NDSS 2025 – Siniel: Distributed Privacy-Preserving zkSNARK

The paper "Siniel: Distributed Privacy-Preserving zkSNARK" was presented at the NDSS Symposium, a forum for network and distributed system security. zkSNARKs are cryptographic tools allowing a prover to convince a verifier of a statement's truth without revealing extra information. A major drawback of existing zkSNARKs is the high computational cost of proof generation. This limitation hinders their use in applications like private payments and smart contracts. Private delegation offers a solution to accelerate proof generation. Siniel is an efficient private delegation framework for zkSNARKs, built using polynomial interactive oracle proof (PIOP) and a polynomial commitment scheme (PCS). Siniel allows a computationally limited prover to delegate expensive computations to multiple workers while preserving witness privacy. A key advantage of Siniel over the state-of-the-art EOS framework is that the prover does not need to participate in the MPC protocol after sharing the private witness. This enables the Siniel prover to fully outsource the entire computation. Experimental comparisons demonstrate Siniel's significant performance advantages over EOS. Under low bandwidth conditions (10 mbps), Siniel reduces delegator computation time by approximately 16% compared to EOS. In high bandwidth conditions (1000 mbps), Siniel achieves an even more substantial 80% time saving. This research was a collaborative effort by authors from Zhejiang University, Shanghai DeCareer Consulting Co., Ltd, Beijing Jiaotong University, Chongqing University, Singapore Management University, and East China Normal University. The NDSS Symposium aims to encourage the application and advancement of security technologies within the Internet community.