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results.md
A universal soundness calculator across FRI-based zkEVM proof systems and security regimes.
It aims to answer questions like:
- "What if RISC0 moves from Babybear⁴ to Goldilocks³?"
- "What if OpenVM moves from the Toy Problem heuristic to the provable Johnson Bound Regime?"
- "What if ZisK moves from the Toy Problem heuristic to the provable Unique Decoding Regime?"
You can run the calculator by doing python3 -m soundcalc.
As a result, the calculator generates / updates results.md.
We currently support the following zkEVMs:
- RISC0
- Miden
- ZisK
We support the following security regimes (see below for explanation of regimes):
- Unique Decoding Regime (UDR)
- Johnson Bound Regime (JBR)
In addition, we give a number based on the ethstark toy problem conjecture for reference.
Consider a fixed set of parameters describing the prover and verifier of a FRI-based zkEVM.
To evaluate the concrete soundness level of such a system, we introduce a parameter θ in the range (0, 1).
The soundness level is then determined as a function of θ and the zkEVM parameters (e.g., field size, code rate).
Depending on the value of θ, the analysis falls into different regimes:
-
UDR (Unique Decoding Regime):
$\theta \leq (1 - \rho)/2$ , where$\rho$ is the code rate. -
JBR (Johnson Bound Regime):
$(1 - \rho)/2 < \theta < 1 - \sqrt{\rho}$ .
Crucially, θ is not an input to the prover or verifier code—it is only used in the soundness analysis.
All three regimes therefore apply to the same zkEVM instance without any change.
We also output the security level estimated by considering the currently best known attack. Here, we currently follow the Toy Problem Regime (TPR) / ethSTARK conjecture.
A flurry of new results on proximity gaps were published in November 2025 (see Nico's summary).
In soundcalc we have incorporated:
- The improved JBR security bounds of BGHKS25
- The removal of the CBR regime, following the results of DG25 and CS25
soundcalc/main.py: Entry pointsoundcalc/zkevms/: One file per supported zkEVMsoundcalc/regimes/: One file per regime (unique decoding, johnson bound, ...)soundcalc/common/: Common utilities used by the entire codebasesoundcalc/report.py: Markdown report generator
The codebase is heavily based on RISC0's Python soundness calculator.
More inspiration:
Based on papers (links point to specific versions where possible):