Research· Important
Microsoft Research debuts Magnetar, a zero-knowledge proving system for ordinary code
Microsoft Research released Magnetar, a zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) capable of generating cryptographic proofs that a program executed correctly, without needing anyone to rerun it or trust the operator. Instead of forcing developers to rewrite applications as custom cryptographic circuits, Magnetar proves standard RISC-V machine code, so programs written in Rust, Go, or C can be compiled normally and proven as-is. Benchmarks across 15 programs show it processing 7.2 to 8.7 million instructions per second on a laptop, with proofs checkable in roughly 12 milliseconds, and its cryptographic security depends only on established hash functions like SHA-256 or SHA-3 rather than elliptic curves or lattice-based schemes.