Zero-knowledge (ZK) protocols have recently found numerous practical applications, such as in authentication, online-voting, and blockchain systems. These protocols are powered by highly complex pipelines that process deterministic programs, called circuits, written in one of many domain-specific programming languages, e.g., Circom, Noir, and others. Logic bugs in circuit-processing pipelines could have catastrophic consequences and cause significant financial and reputational damage. As an example, consider that a logic bug in a ZK pipeline could result in attackers stealing identities or assets. It is, therefore, critical to develop effective techniques for checking their correctness.

Over the last few years, smart-contract hacks have resulted in the loss of billions of assets. To efficiently identify such vulnerabilities, academic and industrial researchers have developed several popular smart-contract fuzzers. However, it has been challenging to objectively compare their bug-finding effectiveness. In this paper, we present Olympia, the first benchmark-generation tool that is designed for smart-contract, rather than general-purpose, fuzzers. We have used Olympia to evaluate the effectiveness of four well known, open-source fuzzers for Solidity smart contracts.

Macro systems are powerful language extension tools for Architecture Description Languages (ADLs). Their generative power in combination with the simplicity of specification languages allows for a substantial reduction of repetitive specification sections. This paper explores how the introduction of function- and record types in a template-based macro system impacts the specification of ADLs. We present design and implementation of a pattern-based syntax macro system for the Vienna Architecture Description Language (VADL). The macro system is directly integrated into the language and is analyzed at parse time using a context-sensitive pred-LL(*) parser. The usefulness of the macro system is illustrated by some typical macro application design patterns. The effectiveness is shown by a detailed evaluation of the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) specification of five different processor architectures. The observed specification reduction can be up to 90 times, leading to improved maintainability, readability and runtime performance of the specifications.