Zero Knowledge Battleship

Zero-Knowledge Battleship is a fully functional implementation of the Battleship game using modern zero-knowledge proof systems. The system allows players to prove the correctness of their moves without revealing their private board configuration.

The project uses the gnark ZK framework in Go and implements:

• Board commitment: Players commit to their hidden board using a MiMC-based hash Merkle tree.
• Custom ZK Circuit: A Groth16 circuit enforces legal Battleship placement, adjacency rules, boundary constraints, and hit/miss correctness without revealing ship positions.
• Proof Generation & Verification: Every move produces a Groth16 proof that the verifier checks against the committed board.
• Constraint Programming: Full constraint logic for board encoding, adjacency rules, ship structure, and witness consistency.
• CLI Tooling: A commandline interface for generating commitments, producing proofs, and verifying moves step-by-step. Designed for reproducibility and debugging.
• Web Interface: A web frontend that allows two players to play Battleship interactively while all shots and responses are verified through real zero-knowledge proofs behind the scenes. The web UI communicates with the prover and verifier components transparently.

This project demonstrates how zero-knowledge proofs enable private, verifiable computation and provides a practical introduction to ZK engineering, including circuit design, witness generation, constraint reasoning, and proof serialization.

Project link: https://github.com/zeinshehab/battleship-zk

• Cryptography
• Zero-Knowledge Proofs
• gnark
• Go
• Groth16
• MiMC
• Constraint Systems