Ethereum Researchers Face Deadline to Close zkEVM Security Gap

Ethereum researchers are racing against time to close a security gap in zkEVM before December.

The better.codes contest measures the cryptographic proof gap that researchers can attack from both sides. The current live leaderboard shows a lower certificate of 63.99 bits and an upper certificate of 116.13 bits for koalaIRS12, leaving 52.14 bits unresolved after nine promoted submissions from seven solvers.

KoalaIRS12 is a fixed parameter profile for an interleaved Reed-Solomon reduction used in proof-system research. The challenge repository defines its score as a spot-check quantity and excludes interpreting it as minus-log2 of whole-system soundness or as full-protocol security.