Introducing Starkacy: Cairo-friendly privacy primitives
After a lot of teasing and many months of research and fumbling around Cairo, we are thrilled to announce Starkacy, a library specifically crafted to deliver starknet-friendly privacy primitives. Our goal is to provide a set of easy to use and understand primitives that can help developers achieve specific privacy goals depending on their application. Starkacy currently targets Cairo 0.10.
Why Starkacy?
We noticed that many efforts in the Starknet ecosystem for providing developers privacy revolved around porting well-known cryptographic primitives to work directly within Cairo. Libraries such as Garaga focus on optimizing well-known zkSNARK primitives to be executed efficiently in Cairo. We believe that this is a reasonable approach to take for several reasons. First, zkSNARKs researchers and developers have spent the past decade inventing and implementing ZK friendly primitives to the point that we now have standard curves, hash functions, etc used solely for this purpose. Second, integrating with well-established frameworks such as circom and arkworks bridges the gap for developers that are already familiar with those popular zkSNARK development frameworks. However, this approach doesn't intrinsically leverage the environment Cairo provides, namely, a STARK-based VM with a tailored cryptography stack. Hence, this is where Starkacy comes in!
What does Starkacy provide?
Starkacy aims to leverage Cairo's environment in order to build purpose built privacy primitives for the Starknet ecosystem.
So far, we have built and designed the following for Starkacy:
Starkjub: A twisted edwards curve in which the underlying field is the stark curve.
Lokum: A pairing-friendly curve generated using cocks-pinch that embeds the stark curve
Schnorr signatures: A signature scheme that is a common building block for many privacy preserving applications (e.g. PrivacyPass)
And more to come...
Next Steps
Starkacy is currently in research and development phase. As such, the protocols we end up adding to Starkacy are based upon the feedback we receive from Starknet developers, researchers and other community members. Community engagement is a cornerstone of this endeavor, as we highly value your input. We invite developers, researchers, and StarkNet enthusiasts to share their privacy concerns and needs, which will play a pivotal role in refining Starkacy's capabilities. Your contributions will be instrumental in shaping Starkacy as a cutting-edge privacy solution within the StarkNet ecosystem.
Looking forward, we are committed to continually updating and expanding Starkacy. Our roadmap includes the integration of additional cryptographic primitives, refining existing features, and adapting to newer Cairo versions. Collaboration is also a key driver for us. We welcome partnerships with projects and institutions that share our goal of a secure and privacy-centric StarkNet. By pooling our resources, we can expedite Starkacy's progress and contribute to an even more robust and user-centric decentralized ecosystem.
You can check out Starkacy's Github repository here.