- suppose that you have a (public) function
f, a (private) inputx, and a (public) outputy. - you want to prove that you know an
xsuch thatf(x) = y, without revealing whatxis. - for the proof to be succinct, you want it to be verifiable much more quickly than computing itself.
- a trusted setup ceremony is a procedure that is done to generate a piece of data that must be used every time some cryptographic protocol is run.
- for some proofs to work, such as zk-snarks, it's necessary to create a common reference string (CRS), which provides public parameters for proving and verifying validity proofs.
- the security of the proving system depends on the csr setup and some zk-rollups attempt to solve this problem by using a multi-party computation ceremony (mpc) with trusted individuals.
- modern protocols use the power-of-tau setup, which has 1-of-N trust model, with N around hundreds.
common reference strings, structured reference strings, trusted setup, multi-party computation ceremony
