Merlin provides two objects: a transcript, which models the public interactions between a prover and a verifier, and a transcript RNG, which uses the transcript to provide defense-in-depth against bad entropy attacks.

This chapter describes how these objects are constructed and the operations they can perform:

• Transcript Operations describes the transcript object.

• Generating Randomness describes the transcript-based RNG.

The next chapter, Using Merlin, describes how to use Merlin to implement a proof protocol.