Dongwei Xiao (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Zhibo Liu (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Yiteng Peng (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Shuai Wang (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

Zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs have been increasingly popular in privacy-preserving applications and blockchain systems. To facilitate handy and efficient ZK proof generation for normal users, the industry has designed domain-specific languages (DSLs) and ZK compilers. Given a program in ZK DSL, a ZK compiler compiles it into a circuit, which is then passed to the prover and verifier for ZK checking. However, the correctness of ZK compilers is not well studied, and recent works have shown that de facto ZK compilers are buggy, which can allow malicious users to generate invalid proofs that are accepted by the verifier, causing security breaches and financial losses in cryptocurrency.

In this paper, we propose MTZK, a metamorphic testing framework to test ZK compilers and uncover incorrect compilations. Our approach leverages deliberately designed metamorphic relations (MRs) to mutate ZK compiler inputs. This way, ZK compilers can be automatically tested for compilation correctness using inputs and mutated variants. We propose a set of design considerations and optimizations to deliver an efficient and effective testing framework. In the evaluation of four industrial ZK compilers, we successfully uncovered 21 bugs, out of which the developers have promptly patched 15. We also show possible exploitations of the uncovered bugs to demonstrate their severe security implications.

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Jung-Woo Chang (University of California, San Diego), Ke Sun (University of California, San Diego), Nasimeh Heydaribeni (University of California, San Diego), Seira Hidano (KDDI Research, Inc.), Xinyu Zhang (University of California, San Diego), Farinaz Koushanfar (University of California, San Diego)

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Qiyang Song (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences; School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Heqing Huang (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Xiaoqi Jia (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences; School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Yuanbo Xie (Institute of Information…

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Taifeng Liu (Xidian University), Yang Liu (Xidian University), Zhuo Ma (Xidian University), Tong Yang (Peking University), Xinjing Liu (Xidian University), Teng Li (Xidian University), Jianfeng Ma (Xidian University)

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