Abstract

Several research teams have recently been working toward the development of practical generalpurpose protocols for verifiable computation. These protocols enable a computationally weak verifier to offload computations to a powerful but untrusted prover, while providing the verifier with a guarantee that the prover performed the requested computations correctly. Despite substantial progress, existing implementations require further improvements before they become practical for most settings. The main bottleneck is typically the extra effort required by the prover to return an answer with a guarantee of correctness, compared to returning an answer with no guarantee. We describe a refinement of a powerful interactive proof protocol due to Goldwasser, Kalai, and Rothblum [21]. Cormode, Mitzenmacher, and Thaler [14] show how to implement the prover in this protocol in time O(SlogS), where S is the size of an arithmetic circuit computing the function of interest. Our refinements apply to circuits with sufficiently “regular ” wiring patterns; for these circuits, we bring the runtime of the prover down to O(S). That is, our prover can evaluate the circuit with a guarantee of correctness, with only a constant-factor blowup in work compared to evaluating the circuit with no guarantee.