{"ID":23475868,"CreatedAt":"2026-09-18T01:09:05.407443952Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-09-20T18:11:56.143995915Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19353","arxiv_id":"2609.19353","title":"Scaling Zero Knowledge UNSAT Verification via Normalized Chaining","abstract":"Proofs of UNSAT are a standard primitive in formal verification and software assurance. In many real-world settings, the proof itself encodes proprietary or security-sensitive information, making public disclosure undesirable. Zero-knowledge certification of UNSAT addresses this tension: it enables a prover to convince a verifier that no satisfying assignment exists, without revealing anything about the underlying proof beyond its validity. Luo et al. recently introduced ZkUnsat, a protocol that achieves this goal by proving the validity of a weakened resolution proof in zero knowledge. ZkUnsat demonstrates the feasibility of zero-knowledge certification; however, its scalability to larger, real-world instances is constrained by substantial prover memory overhead, limiting its real-world applicability. Motivated by advances in UNSAT proof formats such as LRAT, which enable efficient plain-text verification, we present a preprocessing technique that improves the efficiency of ZkUnsat without introducing additional leakage. Our approach normalizes the proof so that each derived clause is justified by a resolution chain of fixed public length k. This eliminates chain-length leakage and reduces prover memory usage. With k = 16, our method certifies roughly 62% more instances than baseline ZkUnsat on the SAT 2002 competition benchmarks. Furthermore, for an equivalent number of certified instances, the memory footprint drops to under 25% of that required by the baseline.","short_abstract":"Proofs of UNSAT are a standard primitive in formal verification and software assurance. In many real-world settings, the proof itself encodes proprietary or security-sensitive information, making public disclosure undesirable. Zero-knowledge certification of UNSAT addresses this tension: it enables a prover to convince...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19353","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.19353v1","authors":"[\"Ashwin Karthikeyan\",\"Ethan Kharitonov\",\"Kuldeep S. Meel\",\"Anwar Hithnawi\"]","published":"2026-09-16T19:28:06Z","proceeding":"cs.CR","tasks":"[\"cs.CR\",\"cs.LO\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}