Cirrus: Performant and Accountable Distributed SNARK
Wenhao Wang
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2026 · Day 1 · Applied Cryptography
This talk introduces **Cirrus**, the first distributed SNARK (Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge) protocol that simultaneously achieves three critical properties: **linear scalability** with low overhead, **accountability** for detecting faulty workers, and **universal trusted setup** that supports multiple applications without per-circuit ceremonies. As zero-knowledge proof workloads grow to support applications like ZK rollups, ZK machine learning, and ZK virtual machines, single-machine proving hits hard memory and time limits. Cirrus distributes the proving workload across multiple machines while keeping per-worker communication logarithmic in circuit size.
AI review
A well-executed distributed systems paper for zero-knowledge proof infrastructure that achieves genuine engineering improvements -- 33M gates in 40 seconds, 7x over prior work. The polynomial splitting trick is mathematically clean. But this is blockchain plumbing with zero offensive security relevance. No vulnerabilities, no attacks, no exploitation techniques.