{"slug": "watermarking-proofs-with-provenance-binding-zk-snarks", "title": "Watermarking Proofs with Provenance-Binding ZK-SNARKs", "summary": "A new paper shows that the provenance-embedding approach used by Succinct Network for zero-knowledge proofs is insecure against preprocessing attacks, with the authors instantiating concrete attacks against KZG-PLONK. The authors propose the first formal definition for provenance-binding ZK-SNARKs and a generic construction that augments code-based polynomial commitments such as BaseFold and FRI with provenance binding, compiling them with Poly-IOPs at minimal overhead. The work matters for outsourced proving services and prover marketplaces that need to bind proofs to a prover identity and a fresh request-time nonce so provers cannot reuse prior work.", "body_md": "The emerging ecosystem of outsourced proving services, decentralized prover networks, and prover marketplaces raises a new requirement for ZK-SNARKs: the need to watermark proofs with provenance information, such as the prover identity and a fresh request-time nonce. The prover identity records who should receive credit for the proof, while the nonce binds the proof to a particular request and is intended to prevent the prover from reusing work performed before that request was created. The key security requirement is that a prover must perform fresh work—comparable to computing the proof from scratch—when generating a proof for a fresh provenance, even if the attacker may have generated the same proofs before or performed precomputation.\nPrior attempts, such as Succinct Network, proposed embedding provenance information in the Fiat-Shamir challenges, though without a rigorous security definition or analysis. We show that this approach is not secure and is vulnerable to preprocessing attacks, in which an adversary can precompute provenance-independent information that can later be used to reduce the effort required to generate proofs for a fresh provenance. We instantiate these attacks against KZG-PLONK.\nTo arrive at a secure construction, we propose the first formal definition for provenance-binding ZK-SNARKs to capture the above desired property. We present a generic construction that augments code-based polynomial commitments, such as BaseFold and FRI, with provenance binding. Compiling them with Poly-IOPs yields provenance-binding ZK-SNARKs. Our construction incurs minimal overhead.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/watermarking-proofs-with-provenance-binding-zk-snarks", "canonical_source": "https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/2516", "published_at": "2026-10-16 16:11:24+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-17 10:03:28.610610+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["Succinct Network", "KZG-PLONK", "BaseFold", "FRI", "Poly-IOPs"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/watermarking-proofs-with-provenance-binding-zk-snarks", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/watermarking-proofs-with-provenance-binding-zk-snarks.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/watermarking-proofs-with-provenance-binding-zk-snarks.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/watermarking-proofs-with-provenance-binding-zk-snarks.jsonld"}}