MSMAC: Accelerating Multi-Scalar Multiplication for Zero-Knowledge Proof

Multi-scalar multiplication (MSM) is the most computation-intensive part in proof generation of Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP). In this paper, we propose MSMAC, an FPGA accelerator for large-scale MSM. MSMAC adopts a specially designed Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) for MSM and optimizes pipelined Point Addition Unit (PAU) with hybrid Karatsuba multiplier. Moreover, a runtime system is proposed to split MSM tasks with the optimal sub-task size and orchestrate execution of Processing Elements (PEs). Experimental results show that MSMAC achieves up to 328X and 1.96X speedups compared to the state-of-the-art implementation on CPU (one core) and GPU, respectively, outperforming the state-of-the-art ASIC accelerator by 1.79X. On 4 FPGAs, MSMAC performs 1,261X faster than a single CPU core.