zkalc is a cryptographic calculator!

zkalc helps you calculate how much time cryptographic operations take on a real computer. If you use our software, consider citing us!

Why?

Cryptographers tend to be good at cryptography but they can be quite bad at estimating the time it takes a computer to run their schemes.

We hope that zkalc can help shorten the gap between cryptography and practice:

• Cryptographers can use the simple zkalc UX to learn how fast their paper will run on various machines
• Protocol designers can more easily tune the parameters of their protocol depending on their requirements

Please see the various pages of the website for more information on how zkalc works.

Prerequisites

To run benchmarks, we assume that make, git, rust (nightly!) and go (> 1.17) are installed in the system.

Installing Go. To install go, you can download the binaries at go.dev/dl and add go/bin to your PATH environment variable.

Installing Rust. To install rust, you can follow rustup.rs and then type rustup default nightly.

Benchmarks

All benchmarks are listed and run inside the benchmarks/ folder. To run them, type:

    $ cd backend
    $ make

The files generated will end up stored in perf/data/new/

Processing Benchmarks

For this step, we require python3. Benchmarks are assumed to be in a parent folder called bench-data resembling our raw data repository.

    $ cd perf
    $ make

Fronted development

To develop the frontend, npm is required. Run:

    $ cd frontend
    $ npm i
    $ npm run dev

To start a local development server

Acknowledgements

We thank NLnet, who supported part of this work via the NGI0 Entrust fund.