Abstract
Verifiable computing (VC) uses cryptography to delegate computation to untrusted workers. But in most VC schemes, the delegated program must first be arithmetized – expressed as a circuit with multiplication and addition over a finite field. Previous work has compiled subsets of languages like C, LLVM, and bespoke assembly to arithmetic circuits. In this paper, we report on a new DSL for VC, called Snårkl (“Snorkel”), that supports encodings of language features familiar from functional programming such as products, case analysis, and inductive datatypes. We demonstrate that simple constraint-minimization techniques are an effective means of optimizing the resulting encodings, and therefore of generating small circuits.
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Notes
- 1.
See Walfish and Blumberg ACM survey [22] for a summary of the recent history.
- 2.
BCGTV [3] approximates potentially nonterminating programs by first translating to assembly (for the bespoke TinyRAM architecture), then “executing” a bounded number of steps of the program by arithmetizing the transition relation of the underlying instruction set architecture (ISA).
- 3.
- 4.
The effect of GHC’s DataKinds extension is to implicitly promote datatypes like
to kinds, and constructors of user-defined datatypes (
, 
, etc.) to type constructors. Type constructors that have been promoted in this way are marked by an initial apostrophe, as in 
. - 5.
The recursion bound is necessary to ensure that elaboration terminates.
- 6.
It would be unsound to rely on these constraints to learn new facts.
- 7.
libsnark was evaluated in [3].
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Stewart, G., Merten, S., Leland, L. (2018). Snårkl: Somewhat Practical, Pretty Much Declarative Verifiable Computing in Haskell. In: Calimeri, F., Hamlen, K., Leone, N. (eds) Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages. PADL 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10702. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73305-0_3
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