Ernstberger, Jens;
Chaliasos, Stefanos;
Kadianakis, George;
Steinhorst, Sebastian;
Jovanovic, Philipp;
Gervais, Arthur;
Livshits, Benjamin;
(2024)
zk-Bench: A Toolset for Comparative Evaluation and Performance Benchmarking of SNARKs.
In: Galdi, Clemente and Phan, Hieu Dong, (eds.)
Security and Cryptography for Networks. SCN 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science,.
(pp. pp. 46-72).
Springer, Cham: Cham, Switzerland.
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Abstract
Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), especially Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge (SNARKs), have garnered significant attention in modern cryptographic applications. Given the multitude of emerging tools and libraries, assessing their strengths and weaknesses is nuanced and time-consuming. Often, claimed results are generated in isolation, and omissions in details render them irreproducible. The lack of comprehensive benchmarks, guidelines, and support frameworks is a major barrier in the development of ZKP applications. In response to this need, we introduce zk-Bench, the first benchmarking framework and estimator tool for performance evaluation of public-key cryptography, with a specific focus on practical assessment of general-purpose ZKP systems. To simplify navigating the complex set of metrics and qualitative properties, we offer a comprehensive evaluation platform, which enables the dissection and analysis of tools for ZKP development to uncover trade-offs throughout the development stack; from low-level arithmetic libraries, to high-level tools for SNARK development. Using zk-Bench, we (i) collect data across 13 different elliptic curves implemented across 9 libraries, (ii) evaluate 5 tools for ZKP development and (iii) provide a tool for estimating cryptographic protocols, instantiated for the proof system, achieving an accuracy of 6–32% for ZKP circuits with up to millions of gates. By evaluating zk-Bench for various hardware configurations, we find that certain tools for ZKP development favor compute-optimized hardware, while others benefit from memory-optimized hardware. We observed performance enhancements of up to 40% for memory-optimized configurations and 50% for compute-optimized configurations, contingent on the ZKP development tool.
| Type: | Proceedings paper |
|---|---|
| Title: | zk-Bench: A Toolset for Comparative Evaluation and Performance Benchmarking of SNARKs |
| Event: | Security and Cryptography for Networks 14th International Conference, SCN 2024 |
| ISBN-13: | 978-3-031-71069-8 |
| DOI: | 10.1007/978-3-031-71070-4_3 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-71070-4_3 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author-accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10198741 |
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