Argo MAC: Garbling with Elliptic Curve MACs

Liam Eagen; Ying Tong Lai

Paper 2026/049

Argo MAC: Garbling with Elliptic Curve MACs

Liam Eagen, Ideal Group

Ying Tong Lai, Ideal Group

Abstract

Off-chain cryptography enables more expressive smart contracts for Bitcoin. Recent work, including BitVM, use SNARKs to prove arbitrary computation, and garbled circuits to verifiably move proof verification off-chain. We define a new garbling primitive, Argo MAC, that enables over $1000\times$ more efficient garbled SNARK verifiers. Argo MAC efficiently translates from an encoding of the bit decomposition of a curve point to a homomorphic MAC of that point. These homomorphic MACs enable much more efficient garbling. In subsequent work, we will describe how to use Argo MAC to construct garbled SNARK verifiers for pairing-based SNARKs.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Preprint.
Keywords: Garbled Circuits Elliptic Curves Homomorphic MACs Bitcoin
Contact author(s): liam @ ideal group
yingtong @ ideal group
History: 2026-01-19: revised; 2026-01-12: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2026/049
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/049,
      author = {Liam Eagen and Ying Tong Lai},
      title = {Argo {MAC}: Garbling with Elliptic Curve {MACs}},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/049},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/049}
}