zkMesh: Feb 2022 recap

Welcome to zkMesh, a monthly newsletter covering the latest in decentralized privacy-enhancing technologies, privacy protocol development, and zero knowledge systems research. 

zkMesh is produced by the Zero Knowledge Podcast & ZK Hack. 

It 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!   

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Research 

• Proof of Efficiency: A new consensus mechanism for zk-rollups - Layer 2 - Ethereum Research by ​​David Schwartz and Jordi Baylina

• Short-lived zero-knowledge proofs and signatures by Arasu Arun, Joseph Bonneau, and Jeremy Clark

• CoinPool: efficient off-chain payment pools for Bitcoin by Gleb Naumenko and Antoine Riard

• The Power of the Differentially Oblivious Shuffle in Distributed Privacy Mechanisms by Mingxun Zhou and Elaine Shi

• Verifiable Relation Sharing and Multi-Verifier Zero-Knowledge in Two Rounds: Trading NIZKs with Honest Majority by Benny Applebaum, Eliran Kachlon and Arpita Patra

• Rainbow Differential Privacy by Ziqi Zhou, Onur Günlü, Rafael G. L. D’Oliveira, Muriel Médard, Parastoo Sadeghi, and Rafael F. Schaefer

• Efficient Verifiable Partially-Decryptable Commitments from Lattices and Applications by Muhammed F. Esgin, Ron Steinfeld, and Raymond K. Zhao

• Azeroth: Auditable Zero-Knowledge transactions in Smart contracts by Gweonho Jeong, Nuri Lee, Jihye Kim, and Hyunok Oh

• Trustless Bitcoin Bridge Creation with Witness Encryption - Cryptography - Ethereum Research by Leona Hioki

• Twilight: A Differentially Private Payment Channel Network by Maya Dotan, Saar Tochner, Aviv Zohar, and Yossi Gilad 

• Zero-Knowledge Protocols for the Subset Sum Problem from MPC-in-the-Head with Rejection by Thibauld Feneuil, Jules Maire, Matthieu Rivain, and Damien Vergnaud

• Proving UNSAT in Zero Knowledge by Ning Luo, Timos Antonopoulos, William Harris, Ruzica Piskac, Eran Tromer, Xiao Wang 

• Lower Bound on SNARGs in the Random Oracle Model by Iftach Haitner, Daniel Nukrai and Eylon Yogev 

• EcGFp5: a Specialized Elliptic Curve by Thomas Pornin

• Breaking Rainbow Takes a Weekend on a Laptop by Ward Beullens

Articles

• Encrypted Search with FHE: Presents usage of tries to speed up search behind FHE, with code examples | Zama | Florent Michel, Joseph Wilson, Edward Cottle

• ZK Identity: Why and How (part 1): Series on advances in cryptography enabling new identity primitives | by 0xPARC

• How to fund your ZK project | ZKValidator | by Hector Perez

• Privacy Tech in Review: Aztec’s ZK Money | ZKValidator | by Hector Perez

• The Ethereum Off-Chain Data Availability Landscape | Celestia | by Aditi, John Adler

• Navigating Privacy on Public Blockchains: On privacy and adoption bottleneck | by Wei Dai

• An extremely casual code review of MetaMask’s crypto: “I did not find any exploitable vulnerabilities in MetaMask’s crypto…this code is is [sic] much harder to audit than it should be.” | by Matthew Green

• Part 2: Improving crypto code in Rust using LLVM’s optnone | Trail of Bits Blog | by Henrik Brodin

• Privacy Preserving Attribution for Advertising | Mozilla Blog | by Martin Thomson 

• A look at Chainalysis' claim to track bitcoin through mixing service CoinJoin | The Block | by Yogita Khatri and Tim Copeland

• Crypto's Challenge: Right-to-Privacy vs. Right-to-Know | Coindesk | by Michael J. Casey

Videos/Podcast

• ZKV presents… Privacy in Polkadot videos

• Nova: Recursive Zero-Knowledge Arguments from Folding Schemes - Srinath Setty 

• Recordings & Slides - ZKProof Resources

• Dude, what's the Danksharding situation? - Dankrad Feist, Ethereum Foundation workshop

Security in a TweetShell 

smartcontracts 🔴✨ @kelvinfichter

Alright. I figured out the Solana x Wormhole Bridge hack. ~300 million dollars worth of ETH drained out of the Wormhole Bridge on Ethereum. Here's how it happened.

February 3rd 2022

3,800 Retweets13,971 Likes

samczsun @samczsun

How did the @wormholecrypto exploit work? I joined forces with @gf_256 and @ret2jazzy to reverse engineer the exploit, and now that it's been patched we can finally share it with you👇

February 3rd 2022

1,780 Retweets5,404 Likes

Vulnerabilities/Audits

• Disclosure: Fixing a critical bug in Optimism's Geth fork

• Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism - Jay Freeman (saurik) 

Guides and Resources

• A review of zk-SNARKs by Thomas Chen, Hui Lu, Teeramet Kunpittaya, and Alan Luo

• Taurus guide to Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solutions

• Estimating the Bit Security of Pairing Friendly Curves: an introduction to pairing cryptography techniques

• L2Fees: how much in transaction fees on Ethereum L2s

• Zero Knowledge Proof — A Guide to Halo2 Source Code by starli

Tools 

• Maat: Symbolic execution made easy from Trail of Bits: a low-level symbolic execution framework based on Ghidra IR p-code, with a python API

• gnark playground: zk-SNARK high-level Golang API to design circuits compiling to WASM from Consensus.

• Zengo: Solana gets a threshold signature library

• 0xPARC: zk-ECDSA: an efficient ECDSA circom implementation

• StealthDrop: Anonymous Airdrops using ZK proofs

Project Updates

• ZKVerse: Why Zero Knowledge Rollups Need a New Consensus Mechanism  

• Mysterium (P2P Bandwidth Marktplace) is partnering with DAppNode for ease of node operation | didem63

• StarkNet: On to the Next Challenge | StarkWare

• Intro to Aleo's Leo Programming Language | The Aleo Team

• Incentivized Testnet Retrospective | The Aleo team

• Dark Forest v0.6 Round 5: The Junk Wars | Dark Forest Team

• Dark Forest & the Diamond Standard | Blaine Blubitz

• Kimchi: The latest update to Mina's proof system | David Wong

• Community Grants — Recognizing Community Contributions | Mina Protocol 

• Testnet Participants' Rewards | Nym

• SCRT Labs Announces Launch of Legendao - Bringing Privacy to Smart Contracts and Public Blockchains | Secret Network

Events/Hackathons/TrustedSetups

• ZK HACK MINI Virtual. March 1-16

• 0xPARC: Applied ZK Learning Group #2  Application due March 4

• The International Conference on Practice and Theory of Public-Key Cryptography (PKC) Virtual. March 8–11

• FSE 2022, the 28th annual Fast Software Encryption conference Athens. March 20-25

• Real World Crypto 2022 Amsterdam / Virtual. April 13–15

• Paris Blockchain Week Paris. April 13-14

• ZKSummit 7 Amsterdam. April 21. Apply to attend or speak here

• ETHAmsterdam Amsterdam. April 22-24

• Blocksplit.net Split, Croatia. May 17-18

• Eurocrypt 2022 Trondheim, Norway. May 30 - June 3

• ZCon 3 June 2022 [CFP open]

• Summer School on Real-World Crypto and Privacy Šibenik, Croatia. June 13-17

• EthCC Paris. July 19-21

• Crypto 2022 Santa Barbara. August 13-18

• The Science of Blockchain Conference 2022 (SBC'22) Stanford. Aug 29-Sep 2

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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.

Lastly, if you have something you think should be included in the next edition or suggestions for the format - tweet at us @zeroknowledgefm!