Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Zero-knowledge (ZK) protocols enable software developers to provide proofs of their programs’ correctness to other parties without revealing the programs themselves. Regular expressions are pervasive in real-world software, and zero-knowledge protocols have been developed in the past for the problem of checking whether an individual string appears in the language of a regular expression, but no existing protocol addresses the more complex PSPACE-complete problem of proving that two regular expressions are equivalent. We introduce Crêpe , the first ZK protocol for encoding regular expression equivalence proofs and also the first ZK protocol to target a PSPACE-complete problem. Crêpe uses a custom calculus of proof rules based on regular expression derivatives and coinduction, and we introduce a sound and complete algorithm for generating proofs in our format. We test Crêpe on a suite of hundreds of regular expression equivalence proofs. Crêpe can validate large proofs in only a few seconds each.
DOI: 10.1145/3763063
Authors: John C. Kolesar, Shan Ali, Timos Antonopoulos, Ruzica Piskac
Institution: Yale University
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
Funder: National Science Foundation
Awards: Collaborative Research: FMitF: Track I: Automating and Synthesizing Parallel Zero-Knowledge Protocols, SaTC: CORE: Small: Automatic Detection and Repair of Side Channel Vulnerabilities in Software Code, Collaborative Research: FMitF: Track I: Automatic Discovery and Verification of Database Query Transformations, DASS: Accountability from Attention, not Assumption
OpenAlex ID: W4414988645