Proving the Wrong Program: Miscompilations as a Threat to zkVM Guarantees
Hui Xuan Tan, Stefanos Chaliasos, Alastair F. Donaldson
A zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) lets an untrusted prover convince a verifier that a program, typically Rust compiled to RISC-V, ran correctly. The proof covers the compiled binary, so a miscompilation can make a correct zkVM produce a valid proof of a computation that differs from the developer's source. We present the first empirical study of miscompilation as a threat to zkVM guarantees, on the production zkVMs SP1 and Jolt. We assemble 88 known rustc and LLVM miscompilations with Rust reproducers, using an LLM agent to recover Rust triggers for 60 of 124 LLVM bugs reported only as LLVM IR. Many of the bugs carry over to zkVMs: 48 of the 88 make a guest commit a wrong output on SP1 and 46 on Jolt, including the same 15 rustc bugs on both. Most bugs that do not reproduce never reach the faulty code on the zkVM's target, e.g. because they need an instruction-set extension. Existing guest programs are rarely affected by accident. Across 13 guests of 10 popular SP1 projects, the buggy and the fixed compiler produce byte-identical binaries in 447 of the 552 guest-bug pairs that build, and the other 105 have the same code or agree on every input we ran. An attacker who contributes code to a guest, however, can trigger these bugs on purpose. For about $40 per project, an LLM agent found patches that look like ordinary optimisations, preserve the behaviour of the guest's source, and expose a known bug in 12 of 366 project-bug pairs, across 11 of 20 projects. In four cases the guest commits a wrong output, including an Ethereum client that rejects a valid block, and in the other eight it fails on a valid input. Reviewing or formally verifying the zkVM or the guest's source cannot catch such a patch, because both are correct. zkVM projects should treat their compiler as part of their trusted base and track the known bugs of their toolchain.
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