Zero Knowledge

Latest Episodes:

Near Protocol's focus on UX Aug 21, 2019

Show notes

In this episode, we sit down with Alexander Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin from Near Protocol to find out about their work. We discuss what brought them to develop Near Protocol, how they used their whiteboard sessions to learn from the best people in the space, the challenge of blockchain UX, and what has motivated them to become one of the fastest moving projects around.

Links:

Near for developers: https://studio.nearprotocol.com/

Whiteboard session: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9tzQn_TEuFWweVbfTbaedFdwVrvaYPq4

Thank you to this week's sponsor [Trail of Bits](trailofbits.com)

Trail of Bits recently releases their smart contract audit executive summary. They aggregated the work of 23 smart contract audits and found that 78% of high impact, easily exploitable findings are discoverable with automated analysis tools, 50% of all findings will never be found with automated tools, and Unit testing has no impact on security

For more on this audit, have a look at their latest blog post

https://blog.trailofbits.com/2019/08/08/246-findings-from-our-smart-contract-audits-an-executive-summary/

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MPC systems with Nigel Smart Aug 14, 2019

Show notes

In this week's episode, we chat with Nigel Smart, Professor of Cryptology at KU Leuven and the co-founder of Unbound Tech, about his background in cryptology, the history of MPC systems, MPC systems in the real world, and how MPC stacks up versus other related cryptography and privacy techniques.

He helps us better understand where MPC comes from, the power of this technology and shares some emerging MPC research topics that he is excited about.

Here are some of the papers or concepts mentioned in this episode:

Our MPC episode

GarbledCircuit

Yao's Millionaire Problem

First FHE paper

Spdz protocol

MPC in the head

NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Initiative

Thank you to our sponsor this week StarkWare

StarkWare will be presenting the StarkWare Sessions - on Sept 16th in Tel Aviv. The event will bring together some of the brightest minds in zero knowledge research from both the academic and application spheres. Topics that will be discussed are self-custodial trading, STARKs for Layer 1, STARK-friendly hash functions and other cool things you can do with STARK proofs.

Use the code Zkpodcast for 20% off the tickets - https://starkware.co/starkware-sessions/

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Eth2.0 update and a look at Libra with Raul Jordan Aug 07, 2019

Show notes

In this week’s episode, we invite Raul Jordan from Prysmatic Labs back to our show. He shares an update about Prysmatic Labs and ETH2.0 development. We cover some of the latest innovations, some existing challenges, timelines, implementation challenges and more.

We also touch on an article that Raul published about the Libra protocol, and talk about how it compares to the public blockchains we all know and love. You can find this here: https://www.tokendaily.co/blog/a-close-look-at-libra-s-source-code

For some more info, please check out the following:

Thank you to our sponsor this week Aragon One.

If you love working with talented designers building smart user interfaces, or if you are simply excited about working on making DAOs easy and accessible to create & manage, then you should check out Aragon One’s available jobs. For more about the Frontend Engineer role, or available jobs in general, check out aragon.one/jobs.

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Accumulators with Ben Fisch Jul 31, 2019

Show notes

In this week’s episode, we chat with Ben Fisch, Stanford PhD student working in Dan Boneh's applied cryptography group. In our conversation, we dig into accumulators, Merkle trees & vector commitments.

We also learn a bit about the RSA Accumulator Paper - entitled Batching Techniques for Accumulators with Applications to IOPs and Stateless Blockchains - that he co-authored with Benedikt Bünz and touch on some of the ways these RSA accumulators could potentially be used in a blockchain context.

Here are a few previous episodes that might help you prep for this interview:

Merkle Trees https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/57

MPCs https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/60

Here are a few concepts and links we mention:

Thank you to our sponsor this week StarkWare

Use the code Zkpodcast for 20% off the tickets - > https://starkware.co/starkware-sessions/

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The road to DEXs with Will Harborne Jul 24, 2019

Show notes

This week, we chat with Will Harborne, co-founder of Ethfinex and previously at Bitfinex, about the path from traditional exchanges, to centralised crypto exchanges and more recently DEXs. We explore what the role of the DEXs really is and what we could imagine seeing in the future of the space.

Some links and articles mentioned:

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Ariel Gabizon on his work with zkSNARKs and the beauty of math Jul 17, 2019

Show notes

In this week’s episode, we welcome Ariel Gabizon, previously a Electric Coin Company (Zcash) engineer and now a cryptographer working on zero knowledge constructions for Filecoin.

Ariel has worked closely with some of the most exciting projects and researchers pushing the boundaries on zero knowledge research. He is also the person who discovered the Zcash bug (along with Sean Bowe and Zooko). In this episode, we explore his journey into the space, what inspires him, and what exciting new paradigms he is exploring today!

Here are some of the articles and topics he mentions:

Thank you to our sponsor this week StarkWare

Use the code Zkpodcast for 20% off the tickets - > https://starkware.co/starkware-sessions/

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Zexe: Decentralized Private Computation with Pratyush Mishra Jul 10, 2019

Show notes

In this episode, we sit down with Pratyush Mishra, CS PhD Student at UC Berkeley and one of the co-authors on the Zexe project, to discuss the Zexe protocol. We cover how this paper came to be, what it aims to solve, how it works, and how it could be used. Recorded at ZCon1 in Split

For more on the protocol, check out:

Zexe: Enabling Decentralized Private Computation Paper https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/962.pdf
Zexe Library - https://github.com/scipr-lab/zexe
This talk by Pratyush at SBC '19: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jr4Es9s1Iog

Our ZK Study Club session on Zexe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RItcNRChrzI&t=4s

Thank you to our sponsor this week Aragon One.

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Zcash community & more with Amber Baldet Jul 03, 2019

Show notes

In this episode, we sit down at the Zcon1 Conference in Croatia with Amber Baldet, CEO and co-founder of Clovyr, former JPMorgan Blockchain Program Lead, and board member of the Zcash Foundation. We chat about about her road to the blockchain space, the problems she aims to solve with her work on Clovyr, some updates about the Zcash community & foundation, the state of zero knowledge research and the potential and challenges around the implementation of zero knowledge systems in the real world.

Thanks again to this week's sponsor Neufund. If you’re interested in how Neufund's open-source technical environment is enabling tokenization of real-world assets or the QA position, check their GitHub profile at github.com/neufund or the Neufund job offers at neufund.org/careers

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From Warp Sync to SPREE with Polkadot's Rob Habermeier Jun 26, 2019

Show notes

In this episode, Anna chats with Robert Habermeier, one of the co-founders of Polkadot and an engineer at Parity Technology, about his early experience with Rust and cryptography, as well as the work he did at Parity on Warp Sync and Lightclients. We then discuss how this helped inspire some of the concepts and design of the Polkadot protocol. We also chat about some of the exciting concepts that he is discovering along the way - such as new architectures to promote interchain security, Trust Wormholes and more!

For more about what we discussed, check out these links:

Polkadot: https://polkadot.network/about/

Warp sync: https://wiki.parity.io/Warp-Sync

Lightclient https://www.parity.io/what-is-a-light-client/

Special thanks to this week's sponsor: Trail of Bits

Trail of Bits is offering a service for young technology companies who could use expert security support, but aren't quite at a stage to hire their own team. The service includes staffing a #security channel to answer questions, review high risk PRs, and integrate the latest in continuous testing into your build pipeline. Visit https://crytic.io/ or www.trailofbits.com for help securing your product.

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TEEs, SGX and the Graphene project Jun 19, 2019

Show notes

In this week's episode we chat with two of the people behind the Graphene project, Chia-Che Tsai of Texas A&M University and Golem developer Lukasz Glen, about TEEs, Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX), and the way the Graphene project aims to make it easier for devs to interact with these hardware enclaves.

Graphene started as a research project at Stony Brook University, led by Chia-Che Tsai and Don Porter, about emerging hardware platforms. In 2015, Intel Labs recognized the potential for Graphene to be an open-source compatibility layer for Intel® SGX, and has contributed to Graphene development since. With Golem and Invisible Things Lab (ITL), the Graphene project has also been now used within a decentralised blockchain context.

The security around TEEs is a hotly debated topic (at least in our community) and we delve into the questions around these with our guests. That said, we do see this as the first of a series of episodes where we explore the challenges and advantages of using TEEs.

https://grapheneproject.io/

Thank you to this week's sponsor Apograf! Apograf has built an extensive collection of open access research papers on cryptography, distributed computer systems and blockchain

If you are interested in finding out more, check out welcome.apograf.io or this link to a curated list of cryptocurrency course materials: https://apograf.io/c/cryptocurrency_class

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