Zero Knowledge

Latest Episodes:

Proof of Necessary Work with Akis Kattis (NYU) May 27, 2020

Show notes

In this week's episode, Anna and guest host Tarun Chitra chat with Akis Kattis, a PhD student at NYU & the co-author of Proof of Necessary Work: Succinct State Verification with Fairness Guarantees - a paper he co-wrote with Joseph Bonneau. They discuss the challenge of Proof of Useful Work, the unique properties that SNARKs have, such as puzzle hardness, that allow for PoNW to overcome these challenges, PoS SNARK systems, elastic block construction, and more.

Here are a few of the articles we mention in the interview:

Proof of Necessary Work: Succinct State Verification with Fairness Guarantees

Stabilizing Congestion in Decentralized Record-Keepers

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Exploring Tezos & their recent Sapling integration May 20, 2020

Show notes

In this week's episode, Anna interviews three people from the Tezos community: Jacob Arluck (co-founders TQ ), Marc Beunardeau and Marco Stronati (both from Nomadic Labs). They chat about the Tezos origin story, the development of the PoS system, the governance of Tezos, and how they are incorporating zk proofs - and specifically Sapling from Zcash - into their system.

Here is some additional info related to the interview:

Nomadic blog post about the Sapling integration

Tezos implementation of Sapling

Wired article about early Tezos issues

Transparent Polynomial Delegation and Its Applications to Zero Knowledge Proof

Thank you to this week's sponsor - Trail of Bits.

Trail of Bits has partnered with Johns Hopkins University to supply vulnerability researchers with software that can produce ZK proofs of exploitability. This is part of a larger effort funded by DARPA, called SIEVE, to push forward the state of the art in zero-knowledge proofs. For more info check out their blog!

https://blog.trailofbits.com/2020/05/21/reinventing-vulnerability-disclosure-using-zero-knowledge-proofs/.

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IPFS 0.5 with Molly Mackinlay from Protocol Labs May 13, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, we chat with Molly Mackinlay, Project Lead for the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) at Protocol Labs. We talk about her journey to Protocol Labs, as well as take a deeper view into IPFS, LibP2P, Bitswap, Testground, the use cases and projects working with these tools, and the specific upgrades they have made with the recent 0.5 IPFS release.

We cover:

the importance of distributed testing infra to facilitate enterprise adoption
how UX and simple tooling plays into the developer upgrade path
the path to decentralisation and the importance of building bridges to the Web2 world

In preparation for this ep, it might be useful to check out our episode last fall with Juan Benet as well.

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DP-3T & Contact Tracing with Kenny Paterson from ETH Zurich May 06, 2020

Show notes

In this week's episode, Anna catches up with Kenny Paterson, Professor of Computer Science and Lead of Applied Cryptography Group at ETH Zurich. The goal of the episode is to take a deeper look at DP-3T and privacy preserving contact tracing research in Europe generally. They cover his work at ETH Zurich, discuss how the DP-3T project came to be, look at risks facing contact tracing protocols generally, and discuss why putting privacy and decentralisation at the heart of these types of protocol is so important.

A few of the topics we cover:

ZKPodcast interview with Claudia Diaz
ZKPodcast interview with Henry de Valence
DP-3T site
Some early critical analysis of the protocol Here + Here
Applied Crypto group at ETH Zurich

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Consensus Algorithms & HotStuff with Ittai Abraham Apr 29, 2020

Show notes

In this week's episode, we go deep into Consensus Algorithms and HotStuff with Ittai Abraham from VMware Research. We chat about the evolution of consensus algorithms, BFT, and how these early ideas have become the backbone of blockchain tech. We cover PBFT, Tendermint and Ittai's research into SBFT, HotStuff, and the improvements he has been working on since HotStuff's incorporation into Facebook's Libra protocol.

The papers and references we mention:

Early zkpodcast episode on consensus with Robert Habermeier
PBFT (Castro and Liskov) (see project here)
BASE (Castro, Rodrigues, and Liskov) (the forgotten companion of PBFT that suggests a clean State Machine abstraction)
Consensus in the Presence of Partial Synchrony (Dwork, Lynch Stockmeyer)
Consensus in the Presence of Partial Synchrony (Dwork, Lynch Stockmeyer) (this paper won the 2007 Dijkstra award)
Multiple leader BFT (Katz and Koo)

Some of Ittai's work:

Ittai's group blog on cryptography and consensus: Decentralized Thoughts blog

We also mention:

Thank you to this week's sponsor Matter Labs.

Matter Labs, the creator of the first zkRollup prototype, is also the team behind zkSync: a user-centric Ethereum scaling solution, secured by zero-knowledge proofs.

zkSync testnet is live! You are welcome to try out its simple and intuitive user interface at zksync.io.

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Crypto libraries, Zcash's Zebra and contact tracing with Henry de Valence Apr 22, 2020

Show notes

In this week's episode, we chat with Henry de Valence from the Zcash Foundation. We discuss what makes for a strong crypto library, some of the work he has been doing at the ZF and he shares an update about the Zebra Zcash client. We also learn about the TCN Coalition, a group he is working with that aims to build and evaluate privacy-preserving contact tracing protocols - an important tool in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

Here are some useful links about things we discussed:

The Zcash Foundation's 2020 Q1 Report

Cosmos Zcash Pegzone research

Desired characteristics and assumptions of a contact tracing system

DP3T protocol

Thank you to this week's sponsor Trail of Bits

In a recent blog post, ToB announced some important updates to Echidna, their smart contract fuzzer. Echidna is one of the tools that the team at Trail of Bits uses the most in their smart contract audits - it has been used in almost 35% of their smart contract audits over the past two years. Including the audits they did for MakerDAO, 0x, and Balancer.

In this update to the fuzzer, they have streamlined integration with complex Truffle projects and the tool now support smart contracts written in Vyper. Thay have also removed the need to write Echidna-specific tests and can automatically fuzz assert statements in Solidity.

For more about all these new features check out the blog all about it here: https://blog.trailofbits.com/2020/03/30/an-echidna-for-all-seasons/

Thanks again Trail of Bits.

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Mixnets and privacy technology with Claudia Diaz from Nym Apr 15, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, Anna catches up with Claudia Diaz, professor at KU Leuven and the Chief Science Officer at Nym Technology to learn about mixnets, the history of privacy technology and how there may be some opportunities for new privacy tech to emerge in this post-pandemic world.

Here is the contact tracing project that Claudia highlights in the episode:

Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing

Analysis of DP3T

A big thank you to this week's sponsor Aztec!

Aztec makes private transactions easy for developers via its Privacy SDK, which removes the complexities of ZK proofs and note management. With Aztec network, you can build custom private assets as well as shields for ERC-20s. The team is now developing the ZK² Rollup, upgrade for this network, which adds ID privacy and improves throughput. Here is a blog post about it. Learn more at aztecprotocol.com or email hello@aztecprotocol.com for API keys. You can also find them on Twitter or [Telegram](t.me/aztecprotocol).

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Exploring FHE with Flavio Bergamaschi from IBM Research Apr 08, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, we chat with Flavio Bergamaschi from IBM research about Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). FHE allows for computation on encrypted data. First developed in 2009 at IBM, this tech has long been the considered only theoretically possible. However, as we learn in the interview, there have been strides made in the last few years and we are starting to see FHE technology being used in some real world applications.

In this interview, we discuss the origin of the technology, what it is, how it can be combined with other cryptographic techniques such as MPC and ZKPs, and applications for FHE technology being explored today.

Here are some relevant links:

IBM's Open Source Homomorphic Encryption Library (HElib) v1.0.0

Towards a Homomorphic Machine Learning Big Data Pipeline for the Financial Services Sector

Homomorphic Training of 30,000 Logistic Regression Models

Homomorphically Securing AI at the Edge

Article on IBM's FHE work with a Brazilian bank

Episode 63: Proxy re-encryption and FHE with NuCypher

Nigel Smart on Multi-Party Computation: From Theory to Practice

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Halo with Sean Bowe and Daira Hopwood from ECC Apr 01, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, we catch up with Sean Bowe and Daira Hopwood from the Electric Coin Company to chat about Halo, a recursive proof composition that doesn't require a trusted setup. We cover the efficiency techniques used in Halo such as "nested amortization", how the protocol was developed, what some of the key findings are, and how it fits in with the other recent SNARK-based protocols.

We touch on the following material:

Sean Bowe on SNARKs, Trusted Setups & Elliptic Curve Cryptography

https://github.com/daira/tweedle

Halo whitepaper

Endomorphism

Latest recursive SNARKitecture with Izaak Meckler from O(1)Labs

Exploring the Fractal transparent SNARK construction

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ZKPs, Audits & Security with Benjamin Perez from Trail of Bits Mar 25, 2020

Show notes

In this week's episode, we chat with Benjamin Perez from Trail of Bits about zero knowledge proof systems and security. We touch on the evolution of the crypto tech auditing business, the new challenges that emerge in zero knowledge proof systems regarding security, some of the recent bugs and vulnerabilities found in zkp systems and more!

Here is our previous episode on this topic with JP of Trail of Bits

Here is some background on the zkp vulnerabilities mentioned.

An Empirical Analysis of Anonymity in Zcash

Remote Side-Channel Attacks on Anonymous Transactions

If you want to join the zkSummit 5 online event, happening on Marcch 31st at 7 am PST, 10am EST, 4pm CET, please buy a ticket for the crowdcast here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/zksummit

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