(2026-02) Composition Theorems for Zero-Knowledge IOPs
2026-02-18
Interactive Oracle Proofs (IOPs) enable a probabilistic verifier interacting with a prover to verify NP statements while reading only few bits from the prover messages. Zero-Knowledge IOPs (ZK-IOPs) have the additional guarantee that a query-bounded (possibly malicious) verifier learns nothing about the NP witness.
We initiate a systematic study of ZK preservation under IOP composition, and prove general composition theorems for ZK-IOPs in the 2- and multi-IOP setting. Our main result shows that ZK is preserved in the setting of perfect, black-box, straight-line ZK (the standard setting for ZK-IOPs), if the outer IOP has an additional mild property that is satisfied by existing ZK-IOPs. Contrary to common belief, this does not follow from composition theorems for multiparty protocols (Kushilevitz, Lindell and Rabin, STOC`06).
Our composition theorems show that ZK-IOPs can be modularly designed by composing sub-protocols, and ZK of the composed system follows seamlessly from the ZK guarantees of its building blocks. Using our composition theorems, we easily derive both new and known results on ZK-IOPs in various settings, including ZK preservation under parallel/sequential composition, ZK of IOPs for sumcheck and codeswitching, ZK of IOPs for NP using arithmetization and sumcheck, and ZK preservation under IOP proof composition (reproving a result of Bootle, Chiesa and Liu, EC`22).