kbfold 0.3.0: ePrint version

Paper

• New title: "Post-Quantum Multilinear Polynomial Commitments from FRI Folding in the Boolean-Kernel Basis" (also in README, CITATION.cff, the crate description and the project page).
• Shorter abstract; plain-text abstract, keywords, category and license for ePrint in paper/EPRINT.md.
• Author block with ORCID; acknowledgments with a statement on the use of generative AI tools.
• Introduction: Figure 1 (the fold dictionary as a commutative diagram), a contribution paragraph on the Lean formalisation, a scope paragraph, and the statement that the paper is self-contained.
• Scope statements in §5 (Remark on batching), §6, §7 and §8 point to the new §10.1 (Future work).
• §10: future work (soundness, zero knowledge, implementation, formal verification, other domains) and §10.2 (Artefacts: repository, release, commands to reproduce each table and check, Lean toolchain).
• Reference added: Libra (Xie et al., CRYPTO 2019).

Rust (breaking changes)

• Compiler of CDHZ25 (Construction 11.7). Salted Merkle trees (leaf H_K0(a || b || salt), 32-byte salts from a keyed BLAKE3 stream), one round salt per round, challenges derived from all previous roots and salts; salts from a fresh operating-system seed per commitment and per opening (getrandom). Transcript label kbfold/v0.3/pcs.
• Quartic extension Fp4 = F_p[i]/(i^4 - 7) and the trait ExtField; the protocol is generic in the challenge field (Fp2 or Fp4).
• Challenge maps of the paper: phi from 64(e+1) bits (the integer reduced mod p^e, base-p digits), and pos (kappa blocks of m+R bits).
• Params gains salt_len, new, classical (148 queries, Fp2), post_quantum (248 queries, Fp4) and validate.
• commit, open and verify return Result<_, Error>; the verifier never panics on malformed proofs. Proof gains round_salts, leaf salts in each opening, and to_bytes (canonical encoding).
• #![forbid(unsafe_code)]; feature insecure-test-vectors (seeded provers, never for production).
• Tests: completeness in both extensions, every single mutation of a proof rejected, lengths and random truncations without panic, fresh salts, invalid parameters; test vectors in rust/vectors/ (transcript challenges, complete proofs). CI runs the vector tests.

Paper (with the code)

• §7: extension fields, salted trees, Fiat-Shamir by rounds, relation to the compiler of CDHZ25, proof format, tests.
• Remark 7.30 (scope), introduction and §10.1 updated: the implementation follows the compiler; the conformance item leaves the future work.
• §9: the measurements were recorded with version 0.1 (to be re-measured).

Benchmarks

• Feature parallel (rayon): transforms, NTT, Merkle trees, folds and sumcheck on all cores; the proofs are identical (CI checks them against the test vectors).
• examples/bench.rs: modes scaling, pq (F_{p^4}, 248 queries), salt, stop, rate, breakdown; CSV with thread count. bench/run_all.sh runs all of them, in both threading modes, and optionally the WHIR implementation as an external reference.
• New measurements in rust/results/vm-2cpu/; the version 0.1 data move to rust/results/v0.1/.

Paper (§9, measurements of 0.3.0)

• All tables re-measured with 0.3.0 (salted trees). New: post-quantum parameters (Table 3), cost of salts, parallel speed-up, and WHIR on the same machine (Table 6), with the three techniques behind its smaller proofs added to future work (§10.1).
• Introduction and conclusion describe the new measurements; stray characters before §10.1 removed.

Committed levels and merged paths (proof 1147 -> 237 KiB at n = 20)

• Committed levels (Params::fold_log, k = 4 by default): the prover commits to w_0, w_k, w_2k, ...; a leaf of w_j (j > 0) holds a coset of 2^k values and the verifier folds k times locally. The commitment tree keeps one fibre per leaf, ordered so that the fibres of a coset are consecutive (the committed string and the relation are unchanged).
• Merged paths: the openings of one committed word are the distinct leaves in increasing order plus one merged authentication path; the verifier rejects unless every node is used exactly once.
• Proof now has level0 and levels (LevelOpening: values, salts, nodes). The transcript absorbs k. Tests cover k = 1..4, all mutations of the new openings, and truncations; vectors regenerated.
• examples/bench.rs: mode arity; breakdown measures the commitment tree.

Paper (committed levels)

• §6.3 "Committing to fewer words": committed levels J, cosets, Lemma 6.x (local folding), the protocol Pi_eval^J and Lemma 6.x (skipping commitments, a reduction to Pi_eval for every transcript).
• §7.9 "Committed levels": Theorem 7.x transfers soundness, binding, round-by-round knowledge soundness, the relaxed version (IOR over a disjoint-union alphabet, reordered implicit instance) and the post-quantum corollary with the same errors; Remark on parameters and merged paths. Reviewed by an independent pass; its corrections are included.
• Lean: new module KBFold/Skip.lean formalises Lemma "Skipping commitments" and Theorem "Committed levels", item 1 (soundness far and close, evaluation binding), with the same axioms as the originals; the Lean appendix, lean/README.md and docs/LEAN_MAP.md list it.
• §8 describes committed levels, leaf order and merged openings; §9 re-measured, with a new table on k; abstract and introduction give the headline numbers; notation table and Lean appendix updated.

Docs

• docs/ROADMAP.md: version 1 (first ePrint submission) and version 2 (revision of the same entry).