Ceno book.

[yczhangsjtu]

This is a draft and outline of the developer document for Ceno.

[yczhangsjtu]

To read the book, first install mdbook as follows:

cargo install mdbook

Then start a local server that serves the content:

cd docs
mdbook serve --open

[kunxian-xia]

showcase how to pass hints & public-io as files

[yczhangsjtu]

Hints from file is done. Public IO as file is not available yet.

[yczhangsjtu]

Some examples in the document failed. Summary of the current status:

• The Fibonacci example:
  • Using --hints=10 prove and verify successfully
  • Using --hints-file hints.bin the prover fails and reports the same error message as the verifier in the next case
• The example in generating-and-verifying-proofs.md:
  • Using --hints=5 the prover succeeds and claims the proof is verified successfully, but the verifier fails
  • Using --hints-file hints.bin the prover fails and reports the same error message as the verifier in the previous case

The hints file just contains the four bytes: 10 0 0 0 or 5 0 0 0

[kunxian-xia]

We need a tool to generate hints.bin automatically from the guest program.

[hero78119]

I think we need to add rust-toolchain.toml

[toolchain]
channel = "nightly-2025-03-25"
targets = ["riscv32im-unknown-none-elf"]
# We need the sources for build-std.
components = ["rust-src"]

specify as nightly build as currently we rely on some features not in stable channel. Otherwise it will suffer build failed

[hero78119]

the root cause failed reported here #1054 (comment) is because in prove internally we generate new pk/vk pair each time, so we need to append "--out-vk vk.bin" prove command to force new generated vk are serialized thus the verify can use same key.

For why pk/vk non-deterministic is under investigating

[hero78119]

In "prove" we exposed few arguments which will generate and invalidate pk/vk in key gen phase, e.g. --field allow change different field which will break the fixed commitment happened in key-gen phase due to different field.

I suggest to simplify, we can temporarily remove keygen phase and only rely on prove, verify for documentation