What Is A Multi-Prover System and How Does It Enhance Rollup Security?

TL;DR

• Traditional blockchains rely on one method to verify transactions.

• Multi-prover systems use multiple methods (provers) for added security.

• This makes it harder for attackers to compromise the system and offers multiple other benefits such as verifiable trust, correctness, and scalability.

A multi-prover system improves the diversity and security of blockchain networks by leveraging multiple proof mechanisms, including Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) like Intel SGX. This setup enhances resilience and decentralization by distributing trust across different types of provers, reducing systemic vulnerabilities.

What is a Multi-Prover System?

Imagine a bank vault secured by multiple locks, each requiring a different key. A multi-prover system operates similarly. Instead of relying on a single method to verify transactions, it utilizes multiple provers – different cryptographic mechanisms – to validate the state of a blockchain. This prover diversity creates an additional layer of security, making it significantly harder for attackers to compromise the system.

Both proofs need to agree with each other before the state transitions are finalized. The assumption is that since the proof mechanisms are independent of one another, it is difficult for hackers to exploit multiple mechanisms simultaneously and finalize invalid state transitions.

Some Ethereum rollups are using TEEs as an additional proving system, especially for zk-rollups, which are used to double-check the correctness of ZK circuits.

This includes:

• Scroll

• Linea

• Taiko

• ZKsync

Integrating an additional proving system prevents scenarios where a faulty ZK proof could jeopardize assets on a rollup due to invalid state transitions.

Automata's Multi-Prover AVS on EigenLayer enables any rollup to integrate a TEE Prover into their architecture.

Learn more about our Multi-Prover AVS here.