Reef: ZKP based on regular expression matching

1 Introduction

Sebastian Angel et al.'s 2023 paper " Reef: Fast Succinct Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge Regex Proofs ". For open source code implementation, see:

• https://github.com/eniac/Reef（Rust）

Reef is used for committed documents to match or not match the regular expression. Can be used to prove:

• Password strength
• Despite the edits, the source of the email
• oblivious Validity of DNS queries
• The presence of DNA mutations.

Reef supports Perl-compatible regular expression syntax, including wildcards, replacements, ranges, capture groups, Kleene-star, negations, and searches. Reef introduces a new type of automata, Skipping Alternating Finite Automata (SAFA), which skips irrelevant parts of documents when generating proofs without destroying reliability, and instantiates SAFA with a lookup argument.

Experimentally evaluated, Reef can generate proofs for documents with 32M characters; these proofs are small and cheap to verify (less than a second).