Prover
A prover is the party that asserts a claim, such as compliance with an agreement, and tries to convince a verifier that it is true 1 2.
In AI verification the prover may be a developer, another private institution or a state; under an international agreement it may be a government that constrains companies within its territory 3 4. The prover usually owns and physically controls the hardware being checked, and Shavit notes that unlimited physical access could undermine a chip's attestation and signed-firmware protections 3. The same paper models the prover as a covert adversary that breaks the rules only if it expects to avoid detection 3. In remote attestation the corresponding role is the attester, a device whose evidence is appraised to judge how far it can be trusted 5.
What the prover supplies depends on the mechanism:
- In proof-of-learning, it reports checkpoints and data batches, so that the verifier can re-run segments of training 3.
- In zero-knowledge proofs of inference, it generates a proof that an output came from running its model, without revealing the weights 6.
- In TEE remote attestation, its hardware produces signed evidence about the software it runs 5.
Related
Used in
- Research demoConfidential multi-party verification
- ProposedMemory wiping and proofs of secure erasure
- ProposedNetwork taps and certifiers
- Research demoTraining-transcript verification (proof-of-learning)⚠
- Research demoSafeguard attestation
- Operational useSampled inference recomputation
- Operational useTEE remote attestation for AI workloads⚠
- Research demoTimed challenge-response and memory-occupation challenges
- Research demoZero-knowledge proofs of inference
- ProposedData-centre memory challenging Draft
- Research demoEZKL
- Research demoGPU contention probes Draft
- ProposedLow-trust AI compute verification system overview
- ProposedModel fingerprint attestation
- Research demoSAGE Draft
- Research demoVRAM-residency challenge Draft
- Research demozkLLM
Sources
- Tier B. D. Benarroch et al. (2022). ZKProof Community Reference. ZKProof. Source recordSupports: a prover tries to convince a verifier that a statement is true · p. 1
- Tier B. B. Harack et al. (2025). Verification for International AI Governance. Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative. Source recordSupports: Prover defined as a state claiming to demonstrate its compliance with an agreement · fn. 20
- Tier B. Y. Shavit (2023). What does it take to catch a Chinchilla? Verifying Rules on Large-Scale Neural Network Training via Compute Monitoring. arXiv. Source recordSupports: Prover as an ML developer or state, modelled as a covert adversary; unlimited physical access can undermine attestation and signed-firmware enforcement; verifier re-runs training segments from reported checkpoints and data batches · §2; §3.1; §5.1
- Tier B. M. Baker et al. (2025). Verifying International Agreements on AI: Six Layers of Verification for Rules on Large-Scale AI Development and Deployment. RAND Corporation. Source recordSupports: Prover may be a private institution or a government constraining companies in its territory · §3.1
- Tier B. H. Birkholz et al. (2023). Remote ATtestation procedureS (RATS) Architecture (RFC 9334). Internet Engineering Task Force (RATS Working Group). Source recordSupports: Attester role: a device whose evidence is appraised to infer how far it is trustworthy · §4 Terminology
- Tier A. H. Sun et al. (2024). zkLLM: Zero Knowledge Proofs for Large Language Models. 2024 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2024). Source recordSupports: proof that an output came from running the model, without revealing its parameters · abstract