International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Zero-knowledge proofs and arithmetic circuits are essential building blocks in modern cryptography, but comparing their efficiency across different implementations can be challenging. In this paper, we address this issue by presenting comprehensive benchmarking results for a range of signature schemes and hash functions implemented in Circom, a popular circuit language that has not been extensively benchmarked before. Our benchmarking statistics include prover time, verifier time, and proof size, and cover a diverse set of schemes including Poseidon, Pedersen, MiMC, SHA-256, ECDSA, EdDSA, Sparse Merkle Tree, and Keccak-256. We also introduce a new Circom circuit and a full JavaScript test suite for the Schnorr signature scheme. Our results offer valuable insights into the relative strengths and weaknesses of different schemes and frameworks, and confirm the theoretical predictions with precise real-world data. Our findings can guide researchers and practitioners in selecting the most appropriate scheme for their specific applications, and can serve as a benchmark for future research in this area.