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.

View More Papers

SKILLPoV: Towards Accessible and Effective Privacy Notice for Amazon...

Jingwen Yan (Clemson University), Song Liao (Texas Tech University), Mohammed Aldeen (Clemson University), Luyi Xing (Indiana University Bloomington), Danfeng (Daphne) Yao (Virginia Tech), Long Cheng (Clemson University)

Read More

CENSOR: Defense Against Gradient Inversion via Orthogonal Subspace Bayesian...

Kaiyuan Zhang (Purdue University), Siyuan Cheng (Purdue University), Guangyu Shen (Purdue University), Bruno Ribeiro (Purdue University), Shengwei An (Purdue University), Pin-Yu Chen (IBM Research AI), Xiangyu Zhang (Purdue University), Ninghui Li (Purdue University)

Read More

A Method to Facilitate Membership Inference Attacks in Deep...

Zitao Chen (University of British Columbia), Karthik Pattabiraman (University of British Columbia)

Read More

ProvGuard: Detecting SDN Control Policy Manipulation via Contextual Semantics...

Ziwen Liu (Beihang University), Jian Mao (Beihang University; Tianmushan Laboratory; Hangzhou Innovation Institute, Beihang University), Jun Zeng (National University of Singapore), Jiawei Li (Beihang University; National University of Singapore), Qixiao Lin (Beihang University), Jiahao Liu (National University of Singapore), Jianwei Zhuge (Tsinghua University; Zhongguancun Laboratory), Zhenkai Liang (National University of Singapore)

Read More