Miden Core Library

Miden core library provides a set of procedures which can be used by any Miden program. These procedures build on the core instruction set of Miden assembly expanding the functionality immediately available to the user.

The goals of Miden core library are:

• Provide highly-optimized and battle-tested implementations of commonly-used primitives.
• Reduce the amount of code that needs to be shared between parties for proving and verifying program execution.

The second goal can be achieved because calls to procedures in the core library can always be serialized as 32 bytes, regardless of how large the procedure is.

Terms and notations

In this document we use the following terms and notations:

• A field element is an element in a prime field of size $p = 2^{64} - 2^{32} + 1$.
• A binary value means a field element which is either $0$ or $1$.
• Inequality comparisons are assumed to be performed on integer representations of field elements in the range $[0, p)$.

Throughout this document, we use lower-case letters to refer to individual field elements (e.g., $a$). Sometimes it is convenient to describe operations over groups of elements. For these purposes we define a word to be a group of four elements. We use upper-case letters to refer to words (e.g., $A$). To refer to individual elements within a word, we use numerical subscripts. For example, $a_0$ is the first element of word $A$, $b_3$ is the last element of word $B$, etc.

Organization and usage

Procedures in the Miden Core Library are organized into modules, each targeting a narrow set of functionality. Modules are grouped into higher-level namespaces. However, higher-level namespaces do not expose any procedures themselves. For example, miden::core::math::u64 is a module containing procedures for working with 64-bit unsigned integers. This module is a part of the miden::core::math namespace. However, the miden::core::math namespace does not expose any procedures.

For an example of how to invoke procedures from imported modules see this section.

Available modules

Currently, Miden core library contains just a few modules, which are listed below. Over time, we plan to add many more modules which will include various cryptographic primitives, additional numeric data types and operations, and many others.

Module	Description
miden::core::collections::mmr	Contains procedures for manipulating Merkle Mountain Ranges.
miden::core::collections::smt	Contains procedures for manipulating Sparse Merkle Trees with 4-element keys and values.
miden::core::collections::sorted_array	Contains procedures for searching in sorted arrays of words.
miden::core::pcs::fri::frie2f4	Contains procedures for verifying FRI proofs (field extension = 2, folding factor = 4).
miden::core::stark::mod	Contains procedures and helpers used when verifying STARK proofs inside the VM.
miden::core::crypto::aead	Contains procedures for authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD) using RPO hash.
miden::core::crypto::dsa::ecdsa_k256_keccak	Contains procedures for verifying ECDSA signatures on the secp256k1 curve with Keccak256 hashing.
miden::core::crypto::dsa::eddsa_ed25519_sha512	Contains procedures for verifying EdDSA signatures on the Ed25519 curve with SHA512 hashing.
miden::core::crypto::dsa::falcon512rpo	Contains procedures for verifying RPO Falcon512 post-quantum signatures.
miden::core::crypto::hashes::blake3	Contains procedures for computing hashes using BLAKE3 hash function.
miden::core::crypto::hashes::keccak256	Contains procedures for computing hashes using Keccak256 hash function.
miden::core::crypto::hashes::rpo256	Contains procedures for computing hashes using Rescue Prime Optimized (RPO256) hash function.
miden::core::crypto::hashes::sha256	Contains procedures for computing hashes using SHA256 hash function.
miden::core::crypto::hashes::sha512	Contains procedures for computing hashes using SHA512 hash function.
miden::core::math::u64	Contains procedures for working with 64-bit unsigned integers.
miden::core::math::u256	Contains procedures for working with 256-bit unsigned integers.
miden::core::mem	Contains procedures for working with random access memory.
miden::core::sys	Contains system-level utility procedures.
miden::core::sys::vm	Contains VM-facing utility procedures needed during Miden VM recursive proof verification.
miden::core::word	Contains utilities for working with words.