`poly-commit`

poly-commit is a Rust library that implements polynomial commitment schemes, a cryptographic primitive that enables parties to "commit" to polynomials and then provide proofs of correct evaluation for these commitments.

This library was initially developed as part of the paper "Marlin: Preprocessing zkSNARKs with Universal and Updatable SRS", and it 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.

Overview

This library provides traits for polynomial commitment schemes, as well as constructions of these based on the paper "Polynomial Commitments". Polynomial commitment (PC) schemes allow a user to first commit to polynomials, and to then provide proofs of correct evaluation for the committed polynomials. PC schemes satisfy the following properties:

• Hiding - commitments and proofs should reveal no information about the committed polynomial.
• Succinctness - commitment and proof size should scale sublinearly with the degree of the committed polynomial. Optionally, verification time should also scale sublinearly.
• Extractability - there should exist an extractor E, which when given a commitment and a valid evaluation proof, should be able to extract a polynomial that agrees with the evaluation.

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 profiles of execution time; to enables this, compile with cargo build --features timer.

License

poly-commit is 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 poly-commit by you shall be dual licensed as above (as defined in the Apache v2 License), without any additional terms or conditions.

Reference paper

Marlin: Preprocessing zkSNARKs with Universal and Updatable SRS Alessandro Chiesa, Yuncong Hu, Mary Maller, Pratyush Mishra, Noah Vesely, Nicholas Ward IACR ePrint Report 2019/XXX

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by: an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council grant (EP/N028104/1), a Google Faculty Award, the RISELab at UC Berkeley, and donations from the Ethereum Foundation and the Interchain Foundation.