Fault Injection Attacks Against zkSTARKs

Alexander Dalton; Markus Schofnegger; Daniel Page

Paper 2026/835

Fault Injection Attacks Against zkSTARKs

Alexander Dalton

, Independent

Markus Schofnegger, [[alloc] init]

Daniel Page, University of Bristol

Abstract

Fault injection attacks on zero-knowledge (ZK) constructions have received little attention in the wider literature. Recent work has demonstrated single-fault key recovery attacks against a ZK signature scheme. In this paper, we detail candidate fault injection attacks against zero-knowledge scalable transparent argument of knowledge (zkSTARK) provers, designed to violate ZK capabilities. zkSTARK proving systems are complex, and implementations differ substantially in their implementation specifics. We propose a corresponding variety of fault injection attacks against different popular algorithmic primitives. To the best of our knowledge, this marks the first exploration of the fault injection surface of zkSTARKs, and of the wider class of general-purpose ZK proving systems.

Note: * Expanded experiments to feature more fine-grained instruction level simulation of the attacks * Added attacks against recursive and DIF varients of Cooley--Tukey to complement existing DIT attack * Adapted attacks to directly target common zk algorithms * Added attack against polynomial masking

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Attacks and cryptanalysis
Publication info: Preprint.
Keywords: Fault Injection Zero Knowledge zkSTARK
Contact author(s): research @ alexdalt co uk
History: 2026-10-14: last of 2 revisions; 2026-04-28: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2026/835
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/835,
      author = {Alexander Dalton and Markus Schofnegger and Daniel Page},
      title = {Fault Injection Attacks Against {zkSTARKs}},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/835},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/835}
}