Experimenting with Collaborative zk-SNARKs: Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Distributed Secrets

A zk-SNARK is a powerful cryptographic primitive that provides a succinct and efficiently checkable argument that the prover has a witness to a public NP statement, without revealing the witness. However, in their native form, zk-SNARKs only apply to a secret witness held by a single party. In practice, a collection of parties often need to prove a statement where the secret witness is distributed or shared among them. We implement and experiment with collaborative zk-SNARKs: proofs over the secrets of multiple, mutually distrusting parties. We construct these by lifting conventional zk-SNARKs into secure protocols among N provers to jointly produce a single proof over the distributed witness. We optimize the proof generation algorithm in pairing-based zk-SNARKs so that algebraic techniques for multiparty computation (MPC) yield efficient proof generation protocols. For some zk-SNARKs, optimization is more challenging. This suggests MPC "friendliness" as an additional criterion for evaluating zk-SNARKs. We implement three collaborative proofs and evaluate the concrete cost of proof generation. We find that over a 3Gb/s link, security against a malicious minority of provers can be achieved with approximately the same runtime as a single prover. Security against N - 1 malicious provers requires only a 2x slowdown. This efficiency is unusual since most computations slow down by orders of magnitude when securely distributed. This efficiency means that most applications that can tolerate the cost of a single-prover proof should also be able to tolerate the cost of a collaborative proof.