Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) are emerging as a foundational technology for verifiable computation, privacy-preserving systems, and blockchain scalability. Their ability to prove the correctness of computations without revealing underlying data, together with succinct verification, has led to rapid adoption in real-world systems, including financial infrastructure, digital identity, and verifiable execution environments such as zkVMs.

Despite strong theoretical foundations, the guarantees provided by ZKP systems in practice depend critically on implementations being correct and faithful to the intended protocol. Modern ZKP deployments rely on a complex software stack that includes high-level circuit descriptions, domain-specific languages, compilers, and backend proof systems. Each layer introduces opportunities for discrepancies between intended and actual behavior. In recent years, multiple implementation failures have shown that even subtle issues, such as missing constraints, unsound compiler optimizations, or incorrect use of cryptographic transformations, can compromise core guarantees including soundness, completeness, and zero-knowledge.

This Dagstuhl Seminar addresses the emerging challenge of assuring that ZKP implementations preserve their intended guarantees by bringing together researchers and practitioners from cryptography, formal methods, programming languages, and systems security. These communities have developed powerful techniques, such as formal verification, program analysis, fuzzing, and testing, but their application to ZKP systems remains fragmented and not yet well understood.

The goal of the seminar is to develop a unified perspective on how implementation failures at different layers of the ZKP stack affect formal guarantees. In particular, participants will:

• analyze how implementation-level errors can translate into violations of cryptographic guarantees;
• evaluate the effectiveness and limitations of existing analysis techniques across different system layers; and
• identify key gaps and research challenges in achieving end-to-end assurance for ZKP systems.

The seminar will prioritize interactive discussions and collaborative working sessions over presentation-heavy updates, with breakout groups focusing on concrete problems such as circuit correctness, compiler soundness, zkVM assurance, and verification of proof systems. These discussions will aim to produce tangible outcomes, including a taxonomy of failure modes, a mapping of assurance techniques to the failures they can detect or prevent, and a research roadmap for end-to-end assurance of ZKP systems.

By bridging theoretical guarantees and practical system behavior, this Dagstuhl Seminar aims to lay the groundwork for trustworthy, verifiable ZKP infrastructure and its safe deployment in critical applications.

Creative Commons BY 4.0

Stefanos Chaliasos, Maria Christakis, Alexander Hicks, and Valentin Wüstholz