if-ZKP: Intel FPGA-Based Acceleration of Zero Knowledge Proofs
Shahzad Ahmad Butt, Benjamin Reynolds, Veeraraghavan Ramamurthy, Xiao Xiao, Pohrong Chu, Setareh Sharifian, Sergey Gribok, Bogdan Pasca · 2024
Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) allow proving a statement's correctness without revealing anything else, enabling privacy in applications like blockchains and digital voting. Recently, Zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs) have helped address ZKPs' scalability challenges and gained significant attention. This paper presents a novel scalable FPGA architecture for accelerating the zk-SNARK prover's compute-intensive multi-scalar multiplication (MSM) operation. The architecture exploits MSM's inherent parallelism, using optimized IP for modular arithmetic. Implemented with Intel OneAPI for FPGAs, it achieves 110x-150x speedup over software for the BLS12-381 and BN128 elliptic curves, utilizing a generic Jacobian coordinate system.