Enhance Cairo Prover with Poseidon Hashing

[neotheprogramist]

We aim to embark on a significant project with profound implications in the zk proofs ecosystem.

Currently, there exists a Cairo prover powered by miniSTARK that is compatible with StarkWare's verifiers. You can find the repository here. This prover employs the blake2 hashing algorithm for generating STARK proofs.

Our objective is to enhance this prover by integrating the Poseidon hashing, which is notably optimized for zk proofs. Notably, the intended outcome is for the prover to generate identical proofs, with the sole distinction being the hashing algorithm employed. Instead of using blake2, we aim to integrate Poseidon.

For reference, there are some pre-existing implementations of the Poseidon hashing algorithm that could potentially guide our development:

• poseidon-rs
• circomlib's Poseidon implementation
• Poseidon252 by dusk-network

Furthermore, during the research phase, another notable discovery was made. A paper describes an enhanced version of Poseidon, referred to as Poseidon2. This variant is apparently faster than the original Poseidon. You can find the paper here. Given this information, it would be prudent for our implementation to be structured in a manner that facilitates an easy transition to Poseidon2, should we decide to adopt it in the future.