microsoft/Nova

microsoft/Nova

Description: Nova: High-speed recursive zero-knowledge arguments from folding schemes

Language: Rust

License: MIT

Stars: 853

Forks: 248

Open issues: 23

Created: 2021-07-22T17:39:31Z

Pushed: 2026-06-12T03:06:22Z

Default branch: main

Fork: no

Archived: no

README:

Nova: High-speed recursive arguments from folding schemes

Nova is a high-speed recursive SNARK (a SNARK is type cryptographic proof system that enables a prover to prove a mathematical statement to a verifier with a short proof and succinct verification, and a recursive SNARK enables producing proofs that prove statements about prior proofs).

More precisely, Nova achieves incrementally verifiable computation (IVC), a powerful cryptographic primitive that allows a prover to produce a proof of correct execution of a "long running" sequential computations in an incremental fashion. For example, IVC enables the following: The prover takes as input a proof $\pi_i$ proving the first $i$ steps of its computation and then update it to produce a proof $\pi_{i+1}$ proving the correct execution of the first $i + 1$ steps. Crucially, the prover's work to update the proof does not depend on the number of steps executed thus far, and the verifier's work to verify a proof does not grow with the number of steps in the computation. IVC schemes including Nova have a wide variety of applications such as Rollups, verifiable delay functions (VDFs), succinct blockchains, incrementally verifiable versions of verifiable state machines, and, more generally, proofs of (virtual) machine executions (e.g., EVM, RISC-V).

A distinctive aspect of Nova is that it is the simplest recursive proof system in the literature, yet it provides the fastest prover. Furthermore, it achieves the smallest verifier circuit (a key metric to minimize in this context): the circuit is constant-sized and its size is about 10,000 multiplication gates. Nova is constructed from a simple primitive called a *folding scheme*, a cryptographic primitive that reduces the task of checking two NP statements into the task of checking a single NP statement.

Details of the library

This repository provides nova-snark, a Rust library implementation of Nova over a cycle of elliptic curves. Our code supports three curve cycles: (1) Pallas/Vesta, (2) BN254/Grumpkin, and (3) secp/secq.

At its core, Nova relies on a commitment scheme for vectors. Compressing IVC proofs using Spartan relies on interpreting commitments to vectors as commitments to multilinear polynomials and prove evaluations of committed polynomials. Our code implements three commitment schemes and evaluation arguments: 1. Pedersen commitments with IPA-based evaluation argument (supported on all three curve cycles) 2. HyperKZG commitments and evaluation argument (supported on curves with pairings, e.g., BN254) 3. Mercury commitments and evaluation argument (supported on curves with pairings, e.g., BN254) - Mercury is an optimized variant that provides faster verification than HyperKZG

For more details on using HyperKZG or Mercury, please see the test test_ivc_nontrivial_with_compression. Both HyperKZG and Mercury require a universal setup (the so-called "powers of tau"). See the [Universal Setup](#universal-setup-for-hyperkzg-and-mercury) section below for details on loading setup parameters.

We also implement a SNARK, based on Spartan, to compress IVC proofs produced by Nova. There are two variants, one that does *not* use any preprocessing and another that uses preprocessing of circuits to ensure that the verifier's run time does not depend on the size of the step circuit. The preprocessing variant of Spartan is called MicroSpartan and is described in the MicroNova paper.

Prior to compression, the IVC proof is folded with a random instance, which makes the proof zero-knowledge. The details of this technique are described in the HyperNova paper.

Supported front-ends

A front-end is a tool to take a high-level program and turn it into an intermediate representation (e.g., a circuit) that can be used to prove executions of the program on concrete inputs. There are three supported ways to write high-level programs in a form that can be proven with Nova.

1. The native APIs of Nova accept circuits expressed with bellman-style circuits. See minroot.rs or sha256.rs for examples.

2. Circom: A DSL and a compiler to transform high-level program expressed in its language into a circuit. There exist middleware to turn output of circom into a form suitable for proving with Nova. See Nova Scotia and Circom Scotia. In the future, we will add examples in the Nova repository to use these tools with Nova.

Cargo Features

The library provides several optional features:

| Feature | Description | |---------|-------------| | io (default) | Enables loading commitment keys from Powers of Tau files | | evm | Enables EVM-friendly serialization | | experimental | Enables experimental features like NeutronNova | | test-utils | Enables insecure test utilities (random tau generation) - do not use in production |

Example usage:

# Default features (includes io)
cargo build

# With EVM verifier support
cargo build --features evm

# With experimental NeutronNova
cargo build --features experimental

Tests and examples

By default, we enable the asm feature of an underlying library (which boosts performance by up to 50\%). If the library fails to build or run, one can pass --no-default-features to cargo commands noted below.

To run tests (we recommend the release mode to drastically shorten run times):

cargo test --release

To run an example:

cargo run --release --example minroot

References

The following paper, which appeared at CRYPTO 2022, provides details of the Nova proof system and a proof of security:

Nova: Recursive Zero-Knowledge Arguments from Folding Schemes \ Abhiram Kothapalli, Srinath Setty, and Ioanna Tzialla \ CRYPTO 2022

For efficiency, our implementation of the Nova proof system is...