By Adams Lee

This is a tutorial intended to cover the very basics of the libsnark software library for creating zk-SNARKs. We will demonstrate how to formulate zk-SNARK circuits, create proofs and verify the proofs.

The repo is set up according to the tutorial by Howard Wu. See that tutorial for more info about how to configure the CMake files etc. We will here just cover the basics.

To install the dependencies:

On Ubuntu 16.04 LTS:

sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake git libgmp3-dev libprocps4-dev python-markdown libboost-all-dev libssl-dev

On Ubuntu 14.04 LTS:

sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake git libgmp3-dev libprocps3-dev python-markdown libboost-all-dev libssl-dev

In order to download and build the repo:

git clone https://github.com/AdamsLee/libsnark-playground.git
cd libsnark-playground
git submodule update --init --recursive
mkdir build && cd build && cmake ..
make

To run the tests go to the build/src directory and run:

./src/range-setup
./src/range-prove 23
./src/range-verify

This test simulates the prover to prove he has a secret value which is less than 188; range-setup (run by prover) simulates to generate the proving key and verification key which will be exported to local files "range_pk.raw" and "range_vk.raw"; range-prove (run by prover) simulates to load the proving key from local file and generate the proof which will be exported to local file "range_proof.raw". A secret integer (less than 188) should be passed to it when running; range-verify (run by verifier) simulates to load the verification key from local file and verify.