zkMesh: Oct 2020 Recap

Welcome to zkMesh - a monthly newsletter focused on sharing resources about 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 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 subscribe! 

One quick highlight: the next Zero Knowledge Summit - ZK6 - is happening on Nov 23-24! Mark your calendars and grab your early bird tickets HERE!

Research

• Introduction to the ironfish.network

• Proofs, Arguments, and Zero-Knowledge by Justin Thaler

• Quarks: Quadruple-efficient transparent zkSNARKs by Srinath Setty and Jonathan Lee

• MuSig2: Simple Two-Round Schnorr Multi-Signatures by Jonas Nick, Tim Ruffing, and Yannick Seurin

• Dory: Efficient, Transparent arguments for Generalised Inner Products and Polynomial Commitments by Jonathan Lee

• Authenticated Dictionaries with Cross-Incremental Proof (Dis)aggregation by Alin Tomescu, Yu Xia and  Zachary Newman

• KVaC: Key-Value Commitments for Blockchains and Beyond by Shashank Agrawal and Srinivasan Raghuraman

• Report 2020/1245 - Two-round trip Schnorr multi-signatures via delinearized witnesses by Handan Kilinc Alper and Jeffrey Burdges

Articles

• Aztec unveils Ethereum Layer 2 network that uses zkSNARKs for both privacy and scalability

• SNARKs and the future of blockchains | by Ruben Somsen

• Zero-knowledge proofs — A method to conserve privacy

• A pitfall of Rust’s move/copy/drop semantics and zeroing data

• Zero-Knowledge Proofs from Information-Theoretic Proof Systems - Part II

• Playing with Randomness and Interactions to Prove Theorems

• An Interview with Torben P. Pedersen | by Prof Bill Buchanan 

• Zcoin Employs Burn-and-Redeem Privacy Model, Offering Alternative to Coinjoins

• Privacy Browser Brave Now Available From the Dark Web

• Exploring Bitcoin's privacy infrastructure | The Block (PAYWALLED)

• First Bitcoin “Mixer” Penalized by FinCEN for Violating Anti-Money Laundering Laws

• A Fearless Introduction to StealthSwap | by Stealthy AI 

• Converting Gröbner bases with FGLM | AS Discrete Mathematics

• How RingCT Hides Monero Transaction Amounts | LocalMonero

• Deanonymising the Kucoin Hacker | by Koh Wei Jie

• Blinder: A New Anonymous Communications Network

Videos/Podcast: 

• zkStudyClub: Izaak Meckler from o1Labs presents Pickles

• Dark Forest Escape Route with Eli Ben-Sasson

• Zero Knowledge Podcast: John Adler on Optimistic vs ZK Rollup and the data availability problem

• ZK Meetup Seoul: ECC X ZKS Deep dive on Halo2

• zkStudyClub: Pratyush Mishra and Nick Spooner discuss recent work on accumulation schemes

• zkStudyClub: Alin Tomescu on authenticated dictionaries and cross-incremental proof (dis)aggregation

Blockchain Privacy in a TweetShell

Josh Baron @JoshuaWBaron

The @DARPA Brandeis program was about building privacy/aware systems, and a paper was recently published highlighting some incredible work done across our performers to put secure computation and differential privacy on a navy ship for an exercise! tippersweb.ics.uci.edu/research/tippe… THREAD

Ruben Somsen 🚵‍♀️🚵‍♂️🚵🚳 @SomsenRuben

1/4 New article summary – SNARKs and the future of blockchains SNARKs for blockchains can be summarized as enabling Non-Interactive Witness Aggregation (NIWA). Anyone can take all witness data in a block, and aggregate it into a SNARK, reducing witness data & verification time.

Larry Cermak @lawmaster

The KuCoin hacker started to mix his Ethereum through 100 ETH batches on Tornado cash. He has about $4.8 million in the wallet. So far sent about 2800 ETH to Tornado but will likely keep going until it's all in there.

Tools 

• StealthSwap Protocol

Guides and Resources

• PLONK by Hand (Part 2: The Proof)

• PLONK by Hand (Part 3: Verification)

• Bitcoin Privacy Guide | A beginners guide to Bitcoin privacy

• Bitcoin-only: Preserve your privacy when using bitcoin.

• Thoughts on Plookup implementation of Sha256 and Keccak

• ttps://www.cryptologie.net

• Deep Dive into Halo 2

• A Crash Course on MPC, Part 3. Shamir Secret-Sharing | by Daniel Escudero

Project Updates

• Dandelion++ for Monero

• Aztec: zkRollup Layer 2 + Privacy | by Joe Andrews | Aztec

• CLSAG audit results | Monero Research Lab and the Monero Audit Workgroup

• Pieter Wuille on Twitter: "Bitcoin Core v0.21 will support Tor V3 addresses, and BIP155 (which supports gossiping them over the network). Tor V2 addresses are deprecated since last month, and will be disabled in Oct 2021

• Curve + zkSync L2: Ethereum’s first user-defined ZK rollup smart contract!

• Tinlake v3: Growing DeFi Usability to the Real World

• New DeFi Bridge For Zcoin via Stakehound – Zcoin

• The Road to L2 Interoperability | by StarkWare

Events/Hackathons

• Zero Knowledge Summit Nov 23-24, 2020 - Tickets HERE

• ACM CCS 2020 Nov 9-13, 2020 Accepted papers HERE

• AsiaCrypt Dec 7-11, 2020 Accepted papers HERE

• Intro to FHE using the Concrete library

————

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