Elliptic Curve ZK-Proof Acceleration on AMD Versal

We present a novel system demo accelerating elliptic curve cryptography on AMD's Versal heterogeneous compute platform. Written by: Ulvetanna Team One major category of zero-knowledge (ZK) proof systems, which includes the popular Groth16 and PLONK constructions, relies heavily on elliptic curve cryptography. The performance bottleneck in generating these types of proofs is a computation called multi-scalar multiplication (MSM). In the case of Groth16, for example, the MSM steps account for 80+% of the overall proving time. Our industry has mounted a massive effort to improve the MSM performance using a variety of hardware accelerators. Notably, the ZPrize competition fueled research into optimized GPU and FPGA solutions, yielding a top, combined GPU submission that performed in only 2.28s a computation that takes 228s on a powerful 112-core CPU. At Ulvetanna, we investigated whether a new, promising high-performance hardware acceleration platform made by AMD, called Versal, could beat

We present a novel system demo accelerating elliptic curve cryptography on AMD's Versal heterogeneous compute platform. Written by: Ulvetanna Team One major category of zero-knowledge (ZK) proof systems, which includes the popular Groth16 and PLONK constructions, relies heavily on elliptic curve cryptography. The performance bottleneck in generating these types of proofs is a computation called multi-scalar multiplication (MSM). In the case of Groth16, for example, the MSM steps account for 80+% of the overall proving time. Our industry has mounted a massive effort to improve the MSM performan