ZodiacMSM: A Heterogeneous, Multi-node and Scalable Multi-Scalar Multiplication System for Zero Knowledge Proof Acceleration

In cryptography, Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is a protocol that enables a party to demonstrate the accuracy of a given statement without revealing any additional information beyond the validity of the statement itself. This protocol ensures both the confidentiality and integrity of the computation, and has therefore become widely utilized in various industries for privacy-preserving, including online age verification and electronic voting. The most computationally demanding component of most Zero Knowledge Proof systems is the Multi-Scalar Multiplication (MSM) module. To address this issue and achieve low power and cost efficient MSM for different applications, a novel heterogeneous MSM architecture, ZodiacMSM, is developed. The architecture utilizes the Pippenger algorithm and a multi-chip design with memory access partitioning, which enables scalable performance for polynomials of various sizes in different ZKP applications. The performance of this architecture increases almost linearly with the number of nodes. ZodiacMSM supports multiple elliptic curves through reconfigurable fully-pipelined point-addition to achieve lower latency and minimize scheduler effort. When evaluated in 28nm, ZodiacMSM is able to achieve 2.3x speedup on MSM with single node and 32x speedup on 16 nodes compared to previous peer-reviewed state-of-the-art ASIC results [8].