trailofbits/mcircuit

mcircuit is a building-block library for programmers working with boolean and arithmetic circuits, the mathematical structures that underpin advanced cryptography and secure computation. Think of it as a set of tools that lets you represent, manipulate, and evaluate circuits as data, rather than having to build that infrastructure from scratch. At a high level, a "circuit" here is a way to break down a computation into simple steps, similar to how a physical circuit processes electrical signals. Boolean circuits work with true/false logic, while arithmetic circuits handle addition and multiplication. The library gives you a way to define these circuits as structured data, extract their inputs and outputs, translate them between different representations, and run "plaintext evaluation", meaning you can actually execute the circuit on real values to see what it produces. It also supports importing and exporting circuits, so you can move them in and out of different tools or storage formats. The people who would use this are typically cryptography researchers or engineers working on secure multi-party computation, zero-knowledge proofs, or related fields. For example, if a team is building a system where multiple parties want to jointly compute something without revealing their individual inputs, they need to express that computation as a circuit. This library handles the plumbing, storing the circuit, transforming it, and running test evaluations, so the team can focus on the higher-level protocol. The project was developed with DARPA funding, which signals that it's oriented toward serious research and government-relevant applications. It's worth noting that this is a Rust library, meaning it's meant to be embedded inside other software rather than used as a standalone app. There's no user interface or command-line tool here, it's purely for developers who need these circuit operations in their own code. The README doesn't go into much detail on supported file formats or specific translation modes, so anyone evaluating it for production use would want to check the API documentation on docs.rs for the finer points.