We invited Jacob Weightman (Compiler Engineer at RISC Zero) to join a fireside chat with Shankara Pailoor (Head of ZK Tooling at Veridise) to discuss our work together on securing the RISC Zero zkVM. The conversation explored how formal methods and purpose-built tooling can deliver provable, continuous security for zero-knowledge systems.
At the center of the discussion was Picus, Veridise’s ZK detection tool, and how it was integrated into RISC Zero’s compiler infrastructure. This integration enables automated, provable formal verification of determinism throughout the development lifecycle — preserving strong security guarantees without slowing down development.
Jacob and Shankara share insights from the integration and discuss what’s next for ZK security.
See the full list of timestamps below.
Conversation highlights
Here’s a breakdown of the topics covered:
- 00:46 — Introduction of Jacob Weightman (RISC Zero)
- 01:44 — Introduction of Shankara Pailoor (Veridise)
- 02:23 — What is Picus and what does it do?
- 03:42 — How the collaboration between RISC Zero and Veridise began
- 05:56 — Why RISC Zero prioritizes formal verification and determinism
- 09:19 — Using Picus to start mitigating bugs in RISC Zero
- 11:39 — Veridise’s perspective: key phases of the security audit
- 15:01 — Next steps after proving determinism for the pre-compile
- 16:59 — How Picus impacts the ZK security audit process and saves time
- 19:58 — Designing DSLs with formal verification in mind
- 25:02 — What’s next for RISC Zero and future formal verification projects
- 30:46 — Veridise’s future plans for zero-knowledge security tooling
About RISC Zero & Boundless:
RISC Zero is a company that provides a zkVM (zero-knowledge virtual machine), enabling developers to generate ZK proofs of ordinary software execution for secure and verifiable computation. Boundless is RISC Zero’s latest product — a universal protocol that brings zero-knowledge (ZK) capabilities to every blockchain.
Learn more:
- Boundless website: https://beboundless.xyz/
- Boundless docs: https://docs.beboundless.xyz/developers/what
- Boundless Twitter: https://x.com/boundless_xyz
- RISC Zero website: https://risczero.com/
