panic in merkle's verify_batch

[dan]

As is currently implemented, if a malicious prover lies about the depth of their Merkle tree, it will cause the verifier to panic.

The panic can be reproduced by replacing this line in the test (

winterfell/crypto/src/merkle/tests.rs

Line 219 in 0acb2a1

 let proof = tree.prove_batch(&[1, 2]).unwrap(); 

)
with

let mut proof = tree.prove_batch(&[1, 2]).unwrap();
proof.depth = proof.depth + 100;

is this an inherent limitation or can this be worked around?

[Irakliy Khaburzaniya]

Thank you for catching this! This shouldn't be too difficult to fix. Basically, we should detect an invalid depth (probably during deserialization) and just return an error.