{
  "slug": "crypto-zk",
  "name": "Cryptography and ZK specialists",
  "short": "cryptography and ZK scanning",
  "title": "AI bug-finding tools for cryptographic code and ZK circuits: zkao, zk-skills, zkCraft and others",
  "summary": "Tools built for the code that general scanners handle worst: finite-field arithmetic, constraint systems, pairing libraries, MPC and post-quantum implementations. zkao (zkSecurity) is the only product in this class with public, upstream-confirmed critical findings; zk-skills makes the same audit patterns available as open-source agent skills; zkCraft adds LLM guidance to circuit fuzzing.",
  "intro": [
    "Cryptographic bugs rarely look like the memory-safety and injection patterns that security models are trained on. A missing subfield membership check, a rogue-key attack on aggregate signatures, or an unconstrained signal in a circuit is only a bug relative to a mathematical specification the tool must understand. The tools here encode that knowledge, either as expert-maintained skills, as multi-agent workflows that build a model of a module's invariants before hunting for violations, or as oracles for fuzzers.",
    "The public evidence base is small but concrete: in 2026 zkao found seven bugs in Cloudflare's CIRCL, a critical soundness bug in OpenVM's pairing library and four zero-days in Bron Labs' library, all confirmed and fixed. zkSecurity's write-ups also document the failure modes: severities mis-rated in both directions, triage of more than a thousand candidates as the bottleneck, and plain frontier-model runs missing what the harnessed workflow found."
  ],
  "choose": [
    "Circom, Leo, Rust or Go cryptographic code with a budget for continuous scanning: **zkao**.",
    "A first pass you can run yourself with Claude Code, Codex or Cursor on Circom: **zk-skills / circom-auditor**.",
    "Automatic, specification-free circuit checks alongside AI: **zkFuzz** with **zkCraft** guidance (and Picus or CIVER, covered on the formal verification side).",
    "Solidity plus Circom, Halo2 or Noir in one product: **Savant Chat** lists all of them; check its ZK results before relying on it.",
    "Whatever tool you run, budget human cryptographer time for validation; every vendor in this category says so."
  ],
  "tools": [
    {
      "name": "zkao",
      "page": "https://agentsast.com/tools/zkao/"
    },
    {
      "name": "zk-skills and circom-auditor",
      "page": "https://agentsast.com/tools/zk-skills/"
    },
    {
      "name": "zkCraft (with zkFuzz)",
      "page": "https://agentsast.com/tools/zkcraft/"
    },
    {
      "name": "AI Grinding for cryptanalysis (research)",
      "page": "https://agentsast.com/tools/ai-grinding-cryptanalysis/"
    }
  ],
  "page": "https://agentsast.com/categories/crypto-zk/",
  "updated": "2026-09-13"
}