04 — Trusted setup · Failure mode

Forgetting that a universal SRS is updatable by you

A public universal SRS is adopted as a fixed artefact, when its defining property is that anyone may re-randomise it. A team that contributes nothing is trusting that at least one of the existing participants was honest; a team that adds one contribution of its own puts itself inside the 1-of-N set, which is cheap and materially strengthens the claim it can make to its users.

By MarketComp Updated 2026-09-12 v1.3 About the authors Changelog

Mitigation

Consider adding your own contribution on top of the adopted SRS. Weigh it against the cost: an updated SRS is no longer byte-identical to the widely mirrored artefact, so you take on publishing and verification duties that reuse would otherwise have avoided.

Cite this page

MarketComp (2026). Forgetting that a universal SRS is updatable by you. The ZK Field Manual (Version 1.3). MarketComp. https://zkpick.com/ceremony/failure-modes/forgetting-that-a-universal-srs-is-updatable-by-you/

@misc{zkfieldmanual-forgetting-that-a-universal-srs-is-updat,
  title        = {Forgetting that a universal SRS is updatable by you — The ZK Field Manual},
  author       = {MarketComp},
  year         = {2026},
  version      = {1.3},
  howpublished = {\url{https://zkpick.com/ceremony/failure-modes/forgetting-that-a-universal-srs-is-updatable-by-you/}},
  note         = {Accessed: YYYY-MM-DD}
}