SoK: Understanding zk-SNARKs: The Gap Between Research and Practice
Junkai Liang
34th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security '25) · Day 1 · Crypto 1: Zero Knowledge and Multi-Party Computation
This talk, presented by Junkai Liang at USENIX Security, delves into a "Systematization of Knowledge" (SoK) regarding **Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs)**. The core objective of this work is to bridge the significant chasm between the theoretical advancements in zk-SNARK research and their practical adoption and implementation in real-world applications. Despite the immense financial potential and widespread interest from companies in leveraging zk-SNARKs for privacy and scalability, the field is plagued by complexity, with over 40 distinct schemes detailed in top conferences, each difficult to grasp even for experts.
AI review
A competent SoK that does exactly what SoKs are supposed to do: organize a messy landscape into something navigable. The master-recipe framework and practical classification of schemes by transparency/PQC/scalability are genuinely useful contributions, and the compiler-bottleneck finding is the right diagnosis. But this is ultimately a survey paper dressed as a conference talk — it surfaces known pain points rather than solving them, and the 'demo' is just 'we tried to use snarkjs and it was slow.'