Work

Towards Fuzzing Zero-Knowledge Proof Circuits (Short Paper)

Year: 2025

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) have evolved from a theoretical cryptographic concept into a powerful tool for implementing privacy-preserving and verifiable applications without requiring trust assumptions. Despite significant progress in the field, implementing and using ZKPs via ZKP circuits remains challenging, leading to numerous bugs that affect ZKP circuits in practice, and fuzzing remains largely unexplored as a method to detect bugs in ZKP circuits. We discuss the unique challenges of applying fuzzing to ZKP circuits, examine the oracle problem and its potential solutions, and propose techniques for input generation and test harness construction. We demonstrate that fuzzing can be effective in this domain by implementing a fuzzer for zk-regex, a cornerstone library in modern ZKP applications. In our case study, we discovered 13 new bugs that have been confirmed by the developers.

Source: ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA)

DOI: 10.1145/3713081.3731718

Authors: Stefanos Chaliasos, Imam Al-Fath, Alastair Donaldson

Institution: Imperial College London

Language: English

Topic: Software Testing and Debugging Techniques

Subfield: Software

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

OpenAlex ID: W4411093954

FWCI: 1.608

Cites: 20

Cited by: 2

Related to: 10