Proper proving

In the last section we made use of the mock prover. Now we would like to go further and use a more advanced prover that will do each step independently (prover/verifier key generation, proof generation, verification).

Keys

In order to go through the full process of proving, we are going to need to create verifying and proving keys.

If you went through the preliminaries you should recall that the verifying key is needed in order to check the correctness of a proof. It essentially contains info about what circuit the proof is referring to (where is each gate and how are they connected?). The proving key essentially consists of the filled out circuit, from which we can create the proof.

Verifying key

Since we don't need to know any of the wire values to create the verifying key, we can supply an empty circuit - i.e. all Values are unknown.

We also need to prepare some parameters that are going to be used by the proof system to make these keys.

Proving key