On February 26, 2024, Renegade tasked zkSecurity with auditing parts of its circuits and smart contracts. The specific code to review was shared via GitHub as public repositories. The audit lasted 3 weeks with 2 consultants.
You can find the full report here.
We found the implementation, as well as the surrounding documentation and specifications, to be of the highest quality. The Renegade team was very responsive and helpful in answering questions and providing additional context.
This blog post looks at Fiat-Shamir from a practical security perspective: it explains why something that seems simple in theory can become surprisingly easy to get wrong. By using vulnerabilities found in real-world projects, we give developers and reviewers a better way to think about Fiat-Shamir when designing, implementing, and auditing proof systems.
An exploration of how an AI tried to work around a security feature to handle a theorem that was hard to prove.
The economics of security have changed. AI has made finding and exploiting bugs cheaper, including in cryptographic and zero-knowledge code, while validation and remediation remain slow. Here is our view of what happened, what comes next, and how teams should change the way they secure their stack to defend against AI-assisted attackers.
We recently teamed up with Celo for an in-depth security audit of the Self project, exploring its innovative approach to on-chain identity using biometric passports and zero-knowledge proofs. During our three-week dive, we examined everything from cryptographic primitives to smart contract architecture and a unique proof delegation system using AWS Nitro Enclaves. The Celo team impressed us with their commitment and responsiveness, and we collaborated on refining the system with strategic improvements. Curious about the nitty-gritty details and our insights? Check out the full report!
Over the past year, we've been diving into whether AI can effectively identify bugs in zero-knowledge circuits and applications, sparking questions about the future of auditing. This led us to develop SnarkSentinel, an AI-powered auditing tool. We'll share what worked, what didn’t, and how our journey with AI could impact auditing. From early challenges with Circom to innovative methods like retrieval-augmented generation and agent-led probing, we'll give you a peek into our findings, including both successes and setbacks with bug detection. Discover how AI might enhance or change the landscape of auditing and what this means for developers and security pros alike.
In June 2025, we uncovered a serious soundness issue in Solana's ZK ElGamal Proof Program that could let attackers manipulate confidential token transfers undetected. We worked with the Anza team to quickly address the flaw by pausing and disabling vulnerable components. This post dives into the root cause, which was a subtle mistake in handling prover-generated challenges within sigma OR proofs, revealing broader lessons in zero-knowledge protocol security. If you're interested in cryptographic protocol design, this could provide valuable insights.
mpcsec.org is a new collaborative reference for common pitfalls in MPC implementations and the cryptographic primitives they rely on, built with contributors from zkSecurity, Trail of Bits, Partisia, and Zama. If you build, audit, or deploy threshold signatures, distributed key generation, or other MPC protocols, it's a starting point for the mistakes you don't want to repeat.
This post is the second part of our series on Circom pitfalls. While part 1 covered issues with assertions, hints, and aliasing, this one explores unsafe component usage and the subtle fact that Circom’s comparison operators work over signed integers.
In Session 08 of "Proof is in the Pudding," we explore how different networks have approached privacy over the years. From E-Cash and Monero to MobileCoin and Zether, we break down blind signatures, Pedersen commitments, stealth addresses, ring signatures, and more. This session provides a comprehensive tour of the techniques used to break linkability, hide addresses, and obscure transaction data in the name of privacy and safety.