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Proving the Wrong Program: Miscompilations as a Threat to zkVM Guarantees
- Published
- Record updated
Summary
This study examines whether compiler miscompilations threaten the guarantees of zkVMs SP1 and Jolt, which prove that Rust programs compiled to RISC-V ran correctly. Of 88 assembled rustc and LLVM miscompilations, 48 caused a wrong output on SP1 and 46 on Jolt. An LLM agent found patches that look like ordinary optimisations and exposed a known bug in 12 of 366 project-bug pairs across 11 of 20 projects, at about $40 per project. Reviewing the zkVM or the guest source cannot catch such patches, because both are correct.
Mitigation
zkVM projects should treat their compiler as part of their trusted base and track the known bugs of their toolchain.