SNARK and Relation Traits

The arkworks ecosystem consists of Rust libraries for designing and working with zero knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments (zkSNARKs). This repository contains efficient libraries that describe interfaces for zkSNARKs, as well as interfaces for programming them.

This library is released under the MIT License and the Apache v2 License (see License).

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

Directory structure

This repository contains two Rust crates:

ark-snark: Provides generic traits for zkSNARKs
ark-relations: Provides generic traits for NP relations used in programming zkSNARKs, such as R1CS

Overview

This repository provides the core infrastucture for using the succinct argument systems that arkworks provides. Users who want to produce arguments about various problems of interest will first reduce those problems to an NP relation, various examples of which are defined in the ark-relations crate. Then a SNARK system defined over that relation is used to produce a succinct argument. The ark-snark crate defines a SNARK trait that encapsulates the general functionality, as well as specific traits for various types of SNARK (those with transparent and universal setup, for instance). Different repositories within the arkworks ecosystem implement this trait for various specific SNARK constructions, such as Groth16, GM17, and Marlin.

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 libraries:

git clone https://github.com/arkworks-rs/snark.git
cd snark
cargo build --release

Tests

This library comes with comprehensive unit and integration tests for each of the provided crates. Run the tests with:

cargo test --all

License

The crates in this repo are licensed under either of the following licenses, at your discretion.

Apache License Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

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

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by: a Google Faculty Award; the National Science Foundation; the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity; and donations from the Ethereum Foundation, the Interchain Foundation, and Qtum.

An earlier version of this library was developed as part of the paper "ZEXE: Enabling Decentralized Private Computation".