J. Wu
Texas A&M University, Texas, United States
Keywords: Zero-Knowledge Proof, zk-SNARKs, Microarchitecture-level Analysis
Data privacy has become a severe concern due to the substantial growth in data gathering and processing, driven by the widespread adoption of cloud computing and cryptocurrency. Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) has emerged as a promising cryptographic protocol for ensuring data privacy. However, ZKP suffers from high computational costs, making it excessively slow when implemented in software. To identify performance bottlenecks in the ZKP protocol, existing research has focused on CPU performance evaluation at the architecture level, considering factors such as execution time and memory consumption. Nevertheless, ZKP protocols have distinct memory and computing needs at each stage, these studies lack detailed CPU performance analyses necessary to improve ZKP performance and promote wider adoption. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive performance analysis of widely used ZKP libraries on CPUs. We perform four different analyses to characterize the CPU microarchitecture, memory, code, and scalability performance of the ZKP protocol on different CPUs. These findings provide valuable insights for designing future ZKP accelerators, leading to more efficient and scalable ZKP implementations.