Polynomial Commitments

poly-commit is a Rust library that implements polynomial commitment schemes. This library was initially developed as part of the Marlin paper, and is released under the MIT License and the Apache v2 License (see License).

WARNING: This is an academic prototype, and in particular has not received careful code review. This implementation is NOT ready for production use.

Overview

A polynomial commitment scheme is a cryptographic primitive that enables a party to commit to a polynomial over a given finite field, and then, later on, to reveal desired evaluations of the polynomial along with cryptographic proofs attesting to their correctness.

This library provides various constructions of polynomial commitment schemes. These constructions support committing to multiple polynomials at a time with differing degree bounds, batching multiple evaluation proofs for the same evaluation point into a single one, and batch verification of proofs.

The key properties satisfied by the polynomial commitment schemes are succinctness, extractability, and hiding. See the Marlin paper for definitions of these properties.

Build guide

The library compiles on the stable toolchain of the Rust compiler. To install the latest version of Rust, first install rustup by following the instructions here, or via your platform's package manager. Once rustup is installed, install the Rust toolchain by invoking:

rustup install stable

After that, use cargo (the standard Rust build tool) to build the library:

git clone https://github.com/scipr-lab/poly-commit.git
cd poly-commit
cargo build --release

This library comes with some unit and integration tests. Run these tests with:

cargo test

Lastly, this library is instrumented with profiling infrastructure that prints detailed traces of execution time. To enable this, compile with cargo build --features print-trace.

License

This library is licensed under either of the following licenses, at your discretion.

• Apache License Version 2.0
• MIT License

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution that you submit to this library shall be dual licensed as above (as defined in the Apache v2 License), without any additional terms or conditions.

Reference papers

Polynomial Commitments
Aniket Kate, Gregory M. Zaverucha, Ian Goldberg
ASIACRYPT 2010

Sonic: Zero-Knowledge SNARKs from Linear-Size Universal and Updateable Structured Reference Strings
Mary Maller, Sean Bowe, Markulf Kohlweiss, Sarah Meiklejohn
CCS 2019

AuroraLight: Improved Prover Efficiency and SRS Size in a Sonic-Like System
Ariel Gabizon
ePrint, 2019

Marlin: Preprocessing zkSNARKs with Universal and Updatable SRS
Alessandro Chiesa, Yuncong Hu, Mary Maller, Pratyush Mishra, Noah Vesely, Nicholas Ward
EUROCRYPT 2020

Proof-Carrying Data from Accumulation Schemes
Benedikt Bünz, Alessandro Chiesa, Pratyush Mishra, Nicholas Spooner
TCC 2020

Signatures of Correct Computation
Charalampos Papamanthou, Elaine Shi, Roberto Tamassia
TCC 2013

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by: an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council grant; a Google Faculty Award; the RISELab at UC Berkeley; and donations from the Ethereum Foundation and the Interchain Foundation.