zk-Bench: A Toolset for Comparative Evaluation and Performance Benchmarking of SNARKs

Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), especially Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge (SNARKs), have garnered significant attention in modern cryptographic applications. Given the multitude of emerging tools and libraries, assessing their strengths and weaknesses is nuanced and time-consuming. Often, claimed results are generated in isolation, and omissions in details render them irreproducible. The lack of comprehensive benchmarks, guidelines, and support frameworks is a major barrier in the development of ZKP applications. In response to this need, we introduce zk-Bench, the first benchmarking framework and estimator tool for performance evaluation of public-key cryptography, with a specific focus on practical assessment of general-purpose ZKP systems. To simplify navigating the complex set of metrics and qualitative properties, we offer a comprehensive evaluation platform, which enables the dissection and analysis of tools for ZKP development to uncover trade-offs throughout the development stack; from low-level arithmetic libraries, to high-level tools for SNARK development. Using zk-Bench, we (i) collect data across 13 different elliptic curves implemented across 9 libraries, (ii) evaluate 5 tools for ZKP development and (iii) provide a tool for estimating cryptographic protocols, instantiated for the PlonK proof system, achieving an accuracy of 6–32% for ZKP circuits with up to millions of gates. By evaluating zk-Bench for various hardware configurations, we find that certain tools for ZKP development favor compute-optimized hardware, while others benefit from memory-optimized hardware. We observed performance enhancements of up to 40% for memory-optimized configurations and 50% for compute-optimized configurations, contingent on the ZKP development tool.