Paper 2019/458
Poseidon: A New Hash Function for Zero-Knowledge Proof Systems
Lorenzo Grassi and Dmitry Khovratovich and Christian Rechberger and Arnab Roy and Markus Schofnegger
Abstract
The area of practical computational integrity proof systems, like SNARKs, STARKs, Bulletproofs, is seeing a very dynamic development with several constructions having appeared recently with improved properties and relaxed setup requirements. Many use cases of such systems involve, often as their most expensive part, proving the knowledge of a preimage under a certain cryptographic hash function, which is expressed as a circuit over a large prime field. A notable example is a zero-knowledge proof of coin ownership in the Zcash cryptocurrency, where the inadequacy of the SHA-256 hash function for such a circuit caused a huge computational penalty. In this paper, we present a modular framework and concrete instances of cryptographic hash functions which work natively with GF(p) objects. Our hash function Poseidon uses up to 8x fewer constraints per message bit than Pedersen Hash. Our construction is not only expressed compactly as a circuit, but can also be tailored for various proof systems using specially crafted polynomials, thus bringing another boost in performance. We demonstrate this by implementing a 1-out-of-a-billion membership proof with Merkle trees in less than a second by using Bulletproofs.
Note: Updated acknowledgements.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
- Category
- Cryptographic protocols
- Publication info
- Published elsewhere. Major revision. USENIX Security '21
- Keywords
- Zero-Knowledge Proof SystemsSNARKSTARKHash Function
- Contact author(s)
- l grassi @ cs ru nl,khovratovich @ gmail com,christian rechberger @ iaik tugraz at,arnab roy @ aau at,markus schofnegger @ iaik tugraz at
- History
- 2023-07-05: last of 11 revisions
- 2019-05-10: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2019/458
- License
-
CC BY