Proof-based general-purpose computing with Magnetar

A new form of computing. Zero-knowledge proofs let you run a workload and receive, alongside the result, a short proof that the program ran correctly. Anyone can check the proof in milliseconds, without rerunning the program, without trusting whoever ran it, and without needing data on which the program was run. Three grand challenges have stood in the way of broad adoption: making proofs fast enough to produce, making them available to normal programs without cryptographic expertise, and resting them on cryptography that will still be trusted many decades from now. Magnetar makes major progress on all three challenges. It proves programs written in Rust, Go, or C, runs 10 to 39 times faster on average than the prior fastest comparable systems, and rests its security only on standard hash functions. It is the latest result of more than a decade of research at Microsoft Research on making zero-knowledge proofs practical. Every result a computer produces comes with an implicit question: did the program run as…