arXiv subjects

Mohsen Ahmadvand

Publications and source records attributed to Mohsen Ahmadvand.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

push0: Scalable and Fault-Tolerant Orchestration for Zero-Knowledge Proof Generation

Zero-knowledge proof generation imposes stringent timing and reliability constraints on blockchain systems. For ZK-rollups, delayed proofs cause finality lag and economic loss; for Ethereum's emerging L1 zkEVM, proofs must complete within the 12-second slot window to enable stateless validation. The Ethereum Foundation's Ethproofs initiative coordinates multiple independent zkVMs across proving clusters to achieve real-time block proving, yet no principled orchestration framework addresses the joint challenges of (i) strict head-of-chain ordering, (ii) sub-slot latency bounds, (iii) fault-tolerant task reassignment, and (iv) prover-agnostic workflow composition. We present push0, a cloud-native proof orchestration system that decouples prover binaries from scheduling infrastructure. push0 employs an event-driven dispatcher--collector architecture over persistent priority queues, enforcing block-sequential proving while exploiting intra-block parallelism. We formalize requirements drawn from production ZK-rollup operations and the Ethereum real-time proving specification, then demonstrate via production Kubernetes cluster experiments that push0 achieves 5 ms median orchestration overhead with 99--100% scaling efficiency at 32 dispatchers for realistic workloads--overhead negligible (less than 0.1%) relative to typical proof computation times of 7+ seconds. Controlled Docker experiments validate these results, showing comparable performance (3--10 ms P50) when network variance is eliminated. Production deployment on the Zircuit zkrollup (14+ million mainnet blocks since March 2025) provides ecological validity for these controlled experiments. Our design enables seamless integration of heterogeneous zkVMs, supports automatic task recovery via message persistence, and provides the scheduling primitives necessary for both centralized rollup operators and decentralized multi-prover networks.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

Optimizing Optimism: Up to 3.5x Faster zkVM Validity Proofs via Sparse Derivation

The Optimism derivation pipeline is engineered for correctness and liveness, not for succinct validity proofs. A straightforward port to a zkVM imposes significant overheads, making validity proofs significantly more costly than necessary. We systematically identify inefficiencies in the current design, analyze their impact on proving costs, and provide a soundness-preserving redesign tailored to zk proving. Our redesign achieves up to 6.5x faster derivation inside zkVMs (3.5x overall speedup) while maintaining identical safety guarantees.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Towards Cost-Effective ZK-Rollups: Modeling and Optimization of Proving Infrastructure

Zero-knowledge rollups rely on provers to generate multi-step state transition proofs under strict finality and availability constraints. These steps require expensive hardware (e.g., GPUs), and finality is reached only once all stages complete and results are posted on-chain. As rollups scale, staying economically viable becomes increasingly difficult due to rising throughput, fast finality demands, volatile gas prices, and dynamic resource needs. We base our study on Halo2-based proving systems and identify transactions per second (TPS), average gas usage, and finality time as key cost drivers. To address this, we propose a parametric cost model that captures rollup-specific constraints and ensures provers can keep up with incoming transaction load. We formulate this model as a constraint system and solve it using the Z3 SMT solver to find cost-optimal configurations. To validate our approach, we implement a simulator that detects lag and estimates operational costs. Our method shows a potential cost reduction of up to 70\%.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2019

SIP Shaker: Software Integrity Protection Composition

Man-At-The-End (MATE) attackers are almighty adversaries against whom there exists no silver-bullet countermeasure. To raise the bar, a wide range of protection measures were proposed in the literature each of which adds resilience against certain attacks on certain digital assets of a program. Intuitively, composing a set of protections (rather than applying just one of them) can mitigate a wider range of attacks and hence offer a higher level of security. Despite the potential benefits, very limited research has been done on the composition of protections. Naive compositions could lead to conflicts which, in turn, limit the application of protections, raise false alarms, and worse yet, yield corrupted binaries. More importantly, inadequate compositions of such protections are not tailored for the program at hand and thus the offered security and performance are sub-optimal. In this paper, we first lay out a set of generic constraints for a conflict-free composition of protections. Then, we develop a composition framework based on a defense graph in which nodes and edges capture protections, their relations, and constraints. The conflicts problem together with optimization requirements are then translated into a set of integer constraints. We then use Integer Linear Programming (ILP) to handle conflicts while optimizing for a higher security and lower overhead. To measure the overhead, we use a set of real-world programs (MiBench dataset and open source games). Our evaluation results indicate that our composition framework reduces the overhead by $\approx$ 39% while maximizing the coverage. Moreover, our approach yields a 5-fold decrease in overhead compared to state-of-the-art heuristics.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2019

VirtSC: Combining Virtualization Obfuscation with Self-Checksumming

Self-checksumming (SC) is a tamper-proofing technique that ensures certain program segments (code) in memory hash to known values at runtime. SC has few restrictions on application and hence can protect a vast majority of programs. The code verification in SC requires computation of the expected hashes after compilation, as the machine-code is not known before. This means the expected hash values need to be adjusted in the binary executable, hence combining SC with other protections is limited due to this adjustment step. However, obfuscation protections are often necessary, as SC protections can be otherwise easily detected and disabled via pattern matching. In this paper, we present a layered protection using virtualization obfuscation, yielding an architecture-agnostic SC protection that requires no post-compilation adjustment. We evaluate the performance of our scheme using a dataset of 25 real-world programs (MiBench and 3 CLI games). Our results show that the SC scheme induces an average overhead of 43% for a complete protection (100% coverage). The overhead is tolerable for less CPU-intensive programs (e.g. games) and when only parts of programs (e.g. license checking) are protected. However, large overheads stemming from the virtualization obfuscation were encountered.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2019

Taxonomy-as-a-Service: How To Structure Your Related Work

Structuring related work is a daunting task encompassing literature review, classification, comparison (primarily in the form of concepts), and gap analysis. Building taxonomies is a compelling way to structure concepts in the literature yielding reusable and extensible models. However, constructing taxonomies as a product of literature reviews could become, to our experiences, immensely complex and error-prone. Including new literature or addressing errors may cause substantial changes (ripple effects) in taxonomies coping with which requires adequate tools. To this end, we propose a \emph{Taxonomy-as-a-Service (TaaS)} platform. TaaS combines the systematic paper review process with taxonomy development, visualization, and analysis capabilities. We evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our platform by employing it in the development of a real-world taxonomy. Our results indicate that our TaaS can be used to effectively craft and maintain UML-conforming taxonomies and thereby structure related work. The screencast of our tool demonstration is available at \url{https://goo.gl/GsTjsP}.

cs.DL↗