Paper 2026/835

Fault Injection Attacks Against zkSTARKs

Markus Schofnegger, [[alloc] init]

Daniel Page, University of Bristol

Abstract

Fault injection attack targetting schemes with Zero-Knowledge (ZK ) properties have been relatively absent in the wider literature. One of the few examples has recently shown a ZK signature scheme to be vulnerable to fault injection attacks. In this paper we detail candidate fault injection attacks against Zero-Knowledge Scalable Transparent Argument of Knowledge (zkSTARK) provers, designed to violate the construction’s zero knowledge capabilities. zkSTARK proving systems are complex, with a huge amount of diversity in implementation specifics. We match the variety within the STARK implementation ecosystem, proposing a variety of ffault injection attacks against different algorithmic primitives. To the best of our knowledge this marks the first exploration of the fault injection surface of zkSTARKs, and of the wider class of general purpose ZK proving systems.

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/835,
      author = {Alexander Dalton and Markus Schofnegger and Daniel Page},
      title = {Fault Injection Attacks Against {zkSTARKs}},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/835},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/835}
}