CertiK Completes Formal Verification of zkWasm, Mathematically Proving the zkVM Sound
Researchers who catalogued 141 security flaws in zero-knowledge proof systems between 2018 and 2024 found 99 of them in the circuits, the sets of mathematical constraints that decide whether a proof is accepted. Almost nine in ten of the 141 broke soundness, the guarantee that a prover cannot convince a verifier of something false, according to a study presented at USENIX Security 2024. A soundness bug does not crash a system or trigger an alert. It lets a false statement pass as true. Every application that trusts the proof then inherits the error without knowing it.
CertiK has now completed a mathematical proof that this cannot happen in zkWasm, the zero-knowledge virtual machine built by Delphinus Lab that proves a WebAssembly program ran correctly without revealing the computation behind it. Working in the Coq proof assistant, CertiK's researchers translated zkWasm's Halo2circuit logic into formal definitions and...
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