Less is more: refinement proofs for probabilistic proofs

There has been intense interest over the last decade in implementations of probabilistic proofs (IPs, SNARKs, PCPs, and so on): protocols in which an untrusted party proves to a verifier that a given computation was executed properly, possibly in zero knowledge. Nevertheless, implementations still do not scale beyond small computations. A central source of overhead is the front-end: translating from the abstract computation to a set of equivalent arithmetic constraints. This paper introduces a general-purpose framework, called Distiller, in which a user translates to constraints not the original computation but an abstracted specification of it. Distiller is the first in this area to perform such transformations in a way that is provably safe. Furthermore, by taking the idea of "encode a check in the constraints" to its literal logical extreme, Distiller exposes many new opportunities for constraint reduction, resulting in cost reductions for benchmark computations of 1.3–50×, and in some cases, better asymptotics.