vega-prover: Low-latency client-side ZK proving over signed data

This repository implements the ZK provers of Vega. They are used for client-side ZK proving of statements over signed data. We focus on optimizing low ZK proving latency, and on settings where statements are proven repeatedly over the same signed data.

This blog post describes the typical application this library targets.

Performance

The prover in this repository is the fastest proof system for client-side ZK proving of statements over signed data: it generates a zero-knowledge proof of age from a typical mobile driver's license of about 2 KB in about 92 ms on a commodity client device. The resulting proof is about 108 KB, and it can be verified in 23 ms. No trusted setup is required. The prover key is 464 KB; it fits comfortably on any phone. For smaller credentials, proving drops to 62 ms, with 83 KB proofs, and 17 ms verification.

[!IMPORTANT] We optimize for low ZK proving latency on signed messages typical in practice — not for raw throughput.

The benches/ directory contains SHA-256 benchmarks using Criterion. Each benchmark measures setup, prep_prove, prove, and verify times across multiple iterations and thread counts, and reports proof sizes.

# Single-circuit (SC) prover: SHA-256 over 1 KiB and 2 KiB messages
RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo bench --bench sha256_vega_sc

# Multi-circuit (MC) prover: 32 SHA-256 step circuits (2048 bytes total)
RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo bench --bench sha256_vega_mc_zkp

Override thread counts with BENCH_THREADS (comma-separated):

BENCH_THREADS=1,8 RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo bench --bench sha256_vega_sc

References

Vega: Low-latency zero-knowledge proofs over existing credentials
Darya Kaviani, Srinath Setty
IEEE S&P 2026

Contributing

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