Benchmarking ZK-Circuits in Circom

Colin Steidtmann; Sanjay Gollapudi

Paper 2023/681

Benchmarking ZK-Circuits in Circom

Colin Steidtmann, University of California, Berkeley

Sanjay Gollapudi, University of California, Berkeley

Abstract

Zero-knowledge proofs and arithmetic circuits are essential building blocks in modern cryptography, but comparing their efficiency across different implementations can be challenging. In this paper, we address this issue by presenting comprehensive benchmarking results for a range of signature schemes and hash functions implemented in Circom, a popular circuit language that has not been extensively benchmarked before. Our benchmarking statistics include prover time, verifier time, and proof size, and cover a diverse set of schemes including Poseidon, Pedersen, MiMC, SHA-256, ECDSA, EdDSA, Sparse Merkle Tree, and Keccak-256. We also introduce a new Circom circuit and a full JavaScript test suite for the Schnorr signature scheme. Our results offer valuable insights into the relative strengths and weaknesses of different schemes and frameworks, and confirm the theoretical predictions with precise real-world data. Our findings can guide researchers and practitioners in selecting the most appropriate scheme for their specific applications, and can serve as a benchmark for future research in this area.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Implementation
Publication info: Preprint.
Keywords: benchmark benchmarking circom circuits zero knowledge zero-knowledge performance metrics analysis Poseidon SHA
Contact author(s): colinsteidtmann @ berkeley edu
sanjaygollapudi @ berkeley edu
History: 2023-05-15: approved; 2023-05-13: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2023/681
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2023/681,
      author = {Colin Steidtmann and Sanjay Gollapudi},
      title = {Benchmarking {ZK}-Circuits in Circom},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2023/681},
      year = {2023},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/681}
}