zkMesh: March 2021 recap

Welcome to zkMesh - a monthly newsletter about the latest in decentralised privacy-preserving technologies, privacy protocol development and zero knowledge systems research. zkMesh is put together by Mikerah (HashCloak) and Anna (Zero Knowledge Podcast, zkSummit). 

It includes links to the latest 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!   

---

Announcement: On April 22nd, Anna will be hosting a ZK Jobs Fair. If you are looking to meet with some of the best zk projects or possibly find your next dream job working on zk tech, please do apply to attend here. This is a satellite event to the ZKProofs Workshop. 

---

Research 

• Fast Factoring Integers by SVP Algorithms by Claus Peter Schnorr

• A Note on Privacy in Constant Function Market Makers by Guillermo Angeris, Alex Evans, Tarun Chitra

• Public-Coin Statistical Zero-Knowledge Batch Verification against Malicious Verifiers by Inbar Kaslasi and Ron D. Rothblum and Prashant Nalini Vasudevan

• Private Set Operations from Oblivious Switching by Gayathri Garimella and Payman Mohassel and Mike Rosulek and Saeed Sadeghian and Jaspal Singh

• Stacking Sigmas: A Framework to Compose Σ-Protocols for Disjunctions by Aarushi Goel, Matthew Green, Mathias Hall-Andersen, and Gabriel Kaptchuk

• Reaching Consensus for Asynchronous Distributed Key Generation by Ittai Abraham, Philipp Jovanovic, Mary Maller, Sarah Meiklejohn, Gilad Stern, Alin Tomescu

• A Geometric Approach to Homomorphic Secret Sharing by Yuval Ishai and Russell W. F. Lai and Giulio Malavolta 

• Subquadratic SNARGs in the Random Oracle Model by Alessandro Chiesa and Eylon Yogev

• Sumcheck Arguments and their Applications by Jonathan Bootle and Alessandro Chiesa and Katerina Sotiraki

• Post-Quantum Succinct Arguments by Alessandro Chiesa and Fermi Ma and Nicholas Spooner and Mark Zhandry

• Non-interactive distributed key generation and key resharing by Jens Groth 

• Non-interactive half-aggregation of EdDSA and variants of Schnorr signatures by Konstantinos Chalkias, François Garillot, Yashvanth Kondi, and Valeria Nikolaenko

• Nova: Recursive Zero-Knowledge Arguments from Folding Schemes by Abhiram Kothapalli, Srinath Setty, Ioanna Tzialla

• ZXAD: Zero-knowledge Exit Abuse Detection for Tor by Akshaya Mani, Ian Goldberg

• On the Anonymity Guarantees of Anonymous Proof-of-Stake Protocols by Markulf Kohlweiss, Varun Madathil, Kartik Nayak, and Alessandra Scafuro

• Attacks and weaknesses of BLS aggregate signatures by Nguyen Thoi Minh Quan 

Articles

• The missing explanation of ZK-SNARKs: Part 1 | David Wong | ZeroKnowledge 

• zkCloud: Decentralized Private Computing | Aleo Blog | Alex Pruden

• Intel to Build Silicon for Fully Homomorphic Encryption: This is Important | anandtech | Dr. Ian Cutress

• Proposed FinCEN rule is a 'grave threat to personal privacy,' says Coin Center | CoinTelegraph | Turner Wright

• Codename KEANU: The first-ever decentralized, on-chain network hard merge between Keep and NuCypher | Nucypher Blog

• Hermez Network launches zk-rollups on Ethereum mainnet to process cheap payments | CoinTelegraph | Andrey Shevchenko 

• Aggregatable Distributed Key Generation | Bentham's Gaze | Sarah Meiklejohn

• Privacy-preserving p2p economic spam protection in Waku v2 | sanaztaheri 

• People's Bank of China Official Says Fully Anonymous Digital Yuan 'Not Feasible' | CoinDesk | Tanzeel Akhtar 

• Brave Takes Aim at Google, Set to Launch Privacy-First Search Engine | Decrypt | Will Gottsegen     

• What are Zero Knowledge Proofs? A simple 3-minute guide | Decrypt | Matt Hussey 

• Zero knowledge proof-based blockchain network Mina goes live | TheBlock | Yogita Khatri

 Videos/Podcast

• zkSessions: Mapping the L2 Landscape event [Playlist]

• ZKV presents: Cosmos Privacy & ZKV Showcase event [Playlist]

• Zero Knowledge Episode 170: Hardware for ZKPs & VDFs with Supranational

• Zero Knowledge Episode 172: ZK languages with Alex Ozdemir

• Zero Knowledge Episode 173: Building Private AMMs with Guillermo Angeris

• Automated STONEWALLx2 - Collaborative Bitcoin transactions for extra privacy

• FC21 Project Wallfacer

• Introducing Noir | Aztec Technical Community Call

Blockchain Privacy in a TweetShell

Steven Galbraith @EllipticKiwi

A short thread on the recent announcement on eprint by Schnorr about "destroying" RSA. Schnorr has an excellent track record on lattice algorithms, and has made major contributions. The eprint paper presents ideas for SVP that may be worth study. I have no time to comment. 1/7

vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin

An attempt at an explanation-in-pictures for how bulletproof-style polynomial commitments work (relevant to Halo and potentially future ethereum upgrades for better scalability) I welcome feedback! I'm trying to experiment with new approaches to make crypto math more intuitive.

Tools

https://github.com/mobilecoinofficial/mc-oblivious

Security and Vulnerabilities

• JP Aumasson has completed the second Bulletproofs+ audit; no major issues found : Monero

• lducas/SchnorrGate: Testing Schnorr's factorization claim in Sage

• Does Schnorr's 2021 factoring method show that the RSA cryptosystem is not secure?

• Acknowledgements and responsible disclosure 1 Introduction by Nguyen Thoi Minh Quan

Guides and Resources

• APPLIED CRYPTOGRAPHY KNOWLEDGE AREA by Kenneth G. Paterson

• OP-TEE: Open Portable Trusted Execution Environment

• Drand - Distributed Randomness Beacon.

• Monero, Audit of Bulletproofs+ code by JP Aumasson

Project Updates

• Introducing Anoma: A Blockchain for Private Asset-agnostic Bartering

• Introducing Axelar Network 

• Penumbra

• Tornado Cash Adds On-Chain Deposit Backups

• Mina's Mainnet Launch Marks a New Era for Internet Privacy and Data Security

• zkSync 2.0 Roadmap Update: zkEVM Testnet in May, Mainnet in August | Matter Labs

• Aztec's ZK-ZK-Rollup, looking behind the cryptocurtain | Aztec Network

• Introducing The Firo Frontier | Firo 

• On What Loopring Is and Isn't | Loopring Protocol

• The Zcash Foundation has Finished an Audit of FROST | Zcash Foundation 

Events/Hackathons/TrustedSetups

• Scaling Ethereum ETHGlobal Hackathon (with a zkRollup track) April 16th - May 14th 2021

• The 4TH ZKPROOF workshop Home edition. April 19 - 29 2021

• ZK Jobs Fair. April 22nd. Apply HERE

• Vienna CyberSecurity and Privacy Research Center Lecture Series Ongoing

• Privacy Enhancing Technologies in Practice - Series of Short Workshops Ongoing

• Crypto/Applied crypto seminar is an informal series at CMU Ongoing

• PKC 2021: International Conference on Practice and Theory of Public-Key Cryptography May 10-13 2021 (Virtual)

• CFAIL The Conference for Failed Approaches and Insightful Losses in Cryptology. August 14, 2021.

• IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy 2021 (EuroS&P) September 6-10, 2021

Jobs: 

• Axelar is looking for an engineer with expertise in Rust and/or cryptography. Developed by the founding members of Algorand and a team with deep roots in consensus and cryptography, Axelar decentralized network breaks barriers for cross-chain communication. Find all jobs here & get in touch at careers@axelar.network

• Aztec is developing cutting edge zk-SNARK technology, in particular having recently deployed the first scalable privacy solution to Ethereum mainnet: zk.money. They are looking for excellent senior software engineers and applied cryptographers. Find all jobs here

• Zero Knowledge Blog is looking for blog contributors - email us at blog@zeroknowledge.fm

Note: If you have an open job position and would like to have us include it in our next edition get in touch!

————

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! 

- Mikerah and Anna