zkMesh: Dec 2021 recap

Happy New Year and welcome to zkMesh! This is a monthly newsletter covering the latest in decentralized privacy-enhancing technologies, privacy protocol development, and zero knowledge systems research. 

Update for the newsletter: After 2 awesome years, Mikerah & Yahsin will be stepping away from the zkMesh project due to time constraints. Want to share a big thank you to both of them for the work we did together! Moving forward, zkMesh will be produced by the Zero Knowledge Podcast & ZK Hack. 

ZK Mesh includes links to research, useful articles, videos, podcasts, tweets, tools, project updates, and events. Expect a new edition at the beginning of every month and be sure to share and subscribe!   

Here is what we found for December 2021:

Research 

• SNARKBlock: Federated Anonymous Blocklisting from Hidden Common Input Aggregate Proofs by Michael Rosenberg and Mary Maller and Ian Miers

• Low-Bandwidth Threshold ECDSA via Pseudorandom Correlation Generators by Damiano Abram and Ariel Nof and Claudio Orlandi and Peter Scholl and Omer Shlomovits

• Alpha-Rays: Key Extraction Attacks on Threshold ECDSA Implementations by Dmytro Tymokhanov and Omer Shlomovits

• A compiler for multi-key homomorphic signatures for Turing machines by Somayeh Dolatnezhad Samarin and Dario Fiore and Daniele Venturi and Morteza Amini

• Succinct Zero-Knowledge Batch Proofs for Set Accumulators by Matteo Campanelli and Dario Fiore and Semin Han and Jihye Kim and Dimitris Kolonelos and Hyunok Oh

• Efficient and Post-Quantum Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Blockchain Confidential Transaction Protocols by Shang GAO and Tianyu ZHENG and Yu GUO and Bin XIAO

• Zero-Knowledge for Homomorphic Key-Value Commitments with Applications to Privacy-Preserving Ledgers by Matteo Campanelli and Felix Engelmann and Claudio Orlandi

• Faster PLONK verification for Halo-like PCD - HackMD by Sean Bowe

• Are We There Yet? Timing and Floating-Point Attacks on Differential Privacy Systems by Jiankai Jin, Eleanor McMurtry, Benjamin I. P. Rubinstein, Olga Ohrimenko

• One Bad Apple Spoils the Bunch: Transaction DoS in MimbleWimble Blockchains by Seyed Ali Tabatabaee, Charlene Nicer, Ivan Beschastnikh, Chen Feng

• Quantum Merkle Trees by Lijie Chen, Ramis Movassagh

• An Obfuscating C Compiler for Encrypted Computing by Peter Breuer

• “They're not that hard to mitigate”: What Cryptographic Library Developers Think About Timing Attacks by Jan Jancar and Marcel Fourné and Daniel De Almeida Braga and Mohamed Sabt and Peter Schwabe and Gilles Barthe and Pierre-Alain Fouque and Yasemin Acar

Articles

• A Succinct Story of Zero Knowledge | dust-nib

• Endgame | Vitalik.ca

• Hash Functions in Plonkup | Anoma | Joshua Fitzgerald

• An Introduction to zk-SNARK: Plonkup | Anoma | Alexander Miles

• Polygon Spends $400M to Scale Ethereum–With ETH2 Around the Corner | Decrypt | Jeff Benson

• Redefining Scalability | StarkWare

• CIA Confirms the Rumors: It Really Is Working on Cryptocurrency Projects | Decrypt | Jeff Benson

• This Monero Malware Is Targeting Enterprise Networks | Decrypt | Jason Nelson

Videos/Podcast

• ZK Podcast: The Road to STARKs and Miden with Bobbin Threadbare

• ZK HACK #7 - Introduction to SnarkyJS and Snapps with Mina

• ZK HACK #6 - Aleo Workshop Part 1, Deriving value from zkSNARKs: an example with ZEXE

Blockchain Security in a TweetShell 

willmctighe.eth @WillMcTighe

1/ ‼️ @TornadoCash (TC) Users ‼️ As part of our recent work on Tutela (tutela.xyz), an open-source anonymity detection tool, @ClassLambda, @federicocarrone & @Istvan_A_Seres have identified 5 ways you may have compromised your TC deposits 🤖:

tutela.xyzTutela

Seres István András @Istvan_A_Seres

🚨Practical Deanonymization Attack in Ethereum, Based on P2P Network Analysis 🤖A very much needed work by Yue Gao et al. tl;dr: Ethereum's P2P stack provides no anonymity guarantees at all. Transaction originators can be easily identified on the P2P lvl. A quick 🧵below! 1/7

Vulnerabilities/Audits

• Project Zero: This shouldn't have happened: A vulnerability postmortem by Tavis Ormandy

• Griphook: Uncovering a Critical Vulnerability in Bitclout by Zengo Blog

• “Alpha-Rays” behind the scenes - HackMD by Omer Shlomovits

• Polygon Lack Of Balance Check Bugfix Postmortem — $2.2m Bounty

• StarkEx Audit by PeckShield

Guides and Resources

• ZKDocs 

• https://github.com/ZenGo-X/silent-ecdsa 

• https://github.com/coinbase/kryptology 

• https://github.com/ankitchiplunkar/cairo-jupyter

Project Updates

• Aleo Community: 2021 Year in Review | Aleo | Anthony DiPrinzio

• Private DeFi with the Aztec Connect Bridge | Aztec Network | Jon Wu

• Introducing Aztec Grants: Funding a Community-Led Privacy Ecosystem | Aztec Network

• Dark Forest Holiday Development Update | Dark Forest Team

• Aleo Token Economics | Aleo | Alex Pruden

• Happy New Year and a Recap of 2021 | Firo | Reuben Yap

• HEZ Token Delisting | Polygon Hermez

• Horizen's Cross-Chain Protocol Zendoo Is Live On Mainnet! | Horizen 

• Introducing: L2 Counterfactual Wallet and FIAT on-ramps | Loopring Protocol | Adam Browman

• Snapps Workshop & Bootcamp Retro | Mina Protocol

• Introducing Mysterium 2.0, the Evolution into an Ecosystem | savannah655

• Oasis 2021 Year in Review | Oasis Protocol Foundation

• Fractal Scaling: From L2 to L3. It's layers all the way down | StarkWare

• Tornado Cash Introduces Arbitrary Amounts & Shielded Transfers | Tornado Cash

• Zcon3: Call For Speakers | Zcash Foundation

Events/Hackathons

• ZKValidator presents Privacy on Cosmos: Scalability edition Virtual. Jan 13, 2022

• Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2022 Virtual. February 14-18, 2022

• ZK Hack Mini Virtual. March 1-16, 2022. Signup to be notified when schedule is live

• ETHBarcelona Barcelona. Early April 2022

• Real World Crypto 2022 [POSTPONED to APRIL] Amsterdam / Virtual. April 13–15, 2022

• Paris Blockchain Week Paris. April 13-14, 2022

• ETHAmsterdam Amsterdam. April 22-24, 2022

• The Science of Blockchain Conference 2022 (SBC'22) [POSTPONED to August] Stanford. 

Jobs: 

• ZK Jobs Board - open jobs from top zk hiring teams!

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There you have it! Hope you liked this edition of zkMesh. Be sure to subscribe to get the next edition in your inbox.

Also, if you have something you think should be included in the next edition or something you think we should do differently with the format - tweet at us @zeroknowledgefm!