Ethereum researchers are racing to close a zkEVM security gap before December

Ethereum’s better.codes contest now measures a cryptographic proof gap that researchers can attack from both sides.At 15:44:47 UTC on Aug. 21, the live leaderboard showed a 63.99-bit lower certificate and a 116.13-bit upper certificate for koalaIRS12. The two results left 52.14 bits unresolved after nine promoted submissions from seven solvers.KoalaIRS12 is a fixed parameter profile for an interleaved Reed–Solomon reduction used in proof-system research. The challenge repository defines its score as a spot-check quantity and expressly excludes interpreting it as minus-log2 of whole-system soundness or as full-protocol security.Researchers now have a public, reproducible measure of the distance between what the challenge has proved safe and what its upper certificate still rules unsafe.What the leaderboard provesThe contest uses two tracks to close the interval.The soundness track raises the lower certificate. At a certified radius, a successful submission proves that the benchmark’s executable reduction-error bound meets the encoded target, then maps that radius to the score displayed on the board.The attack track lowers the upper certificate. Its theorem certifies an unsafe suffix...