Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has introduced a new cryptographic protocol called Circle STARKs, promising to enhance blockchain security and efficiency.
In his latest post, Buterin explains that this technological leap utilizes smaller fields like Mersenne31 to significantly improve proving speed without compromising security measures.
“The most important trend in STARK protocol design over the last two years has been the switch to working over small fields,” Buterin notes.
Traditional Scalable Transparent ARguments of Knowledge (STARKs) operate over 256-bit fields, which, while secure, are often inefficient.
Circle STARKs, however, leverage smaller fields, resulting in reduced computational costs and faster proving speeds.
This improvement allows for impressive gains, such as verifying 620,000 Poseidon2 hashes per second on an M3 laptop.
Buterin highlights that previous STARK implementations made smaller fields “naturally compatible with verifying elliptic curve-based signatures” but “led to inefficiency” due to the large numbers involved.
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Traditional small fields have limited possible values, making them susceptible to brute-force attacks.
Circle STARKs counteract this vulnerability by performing multiple random checks and using extension fields, which expand the set of values attackers need to guess.
This creates a computationally prohibitive barrier for attackers, maintaining the protocol’s integrity.
“With STARKs over smaller fields, we have a problem: there are only about two billion possible values of x to choose from, and so an attacker wanting to make a fake proof need only try two billion times—a lot of work, but quite doable for a determined attacker!” Buterin states.
A crucial aspect of Circle STARKs is the Fast Reed-Solomon Interactive Oracle Proofs of Proximity (FRI), which prove that a function is a polynomial of a certain degree.
Introducing Circle FRI, an approach that maintains the integrity of the cryptographic process, Circle STARKs ensure that non-polynomial inputs fail the proof.
By utilizing small fields and this new mathematical structure, Circle STARKs offer more flexibility and versatility for efficient computational performance.
This innovative protocol marks a significant step forward in the evolution of blockchain technology, combining enhanced security measures with increased efficiency.
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