zkMesh: Oct 2021 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 put together by Mikerah & Yahsin from HashCloak, Mariana and Anna from Zero Knowledge Podcast & ZKValidator. 

Here you find 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!   

**Check out ZK Hack - a 7-week zk workshop and puzzle competition** 

Research 

• On the security of ECDSA with additive key derivation and presignatures by Jens Groth and Victor Shoup

• Efficient Functional Commitments: How to Commit to Private Functions by Dan Boneh and Wilson Nguyen and Alex Ozdemir

• Families of SNARK-friendly 2-chains of elliptic curves by Youssef El Housni and Aurore Guillevic

• Plumo: An Ultralight Blockchain Client by Psi Vesely and Kobi Gurkan and Michael Straka and Ariel Gabizon and Philipp Jovanovic and Georgios Konstantopoulos and Asa Oines and Marek Olszewski and and Eran Tromer

• Highly Efficient OT-Based Multiplication Protocols by Iftach Haitner and Nikolaos Makriyannis and Samuel Ranellucci and Eliad Tsfadia

• How to Prove Schnorr Assuming Schnorr: Security of Multi- and Threshold Signatures by Elizabeth Crites and Chelsea Komlo and Mary Maller

• Fiat-Shamir Transformation of Multi-Round Interactive Proofs by Thomas Attema and Serge Fehr and Michael Klooß

• Efficient Threshold-Optimal ECDSA by Michaella Pettit

• Fiat–Shamir Bulletproofs are Non-Malleable (in the Algebraic Group Model) by Chaya Ganesh and Claudio Orlandi and Mahak Pancholi and Akira Takahashi and Daniel Tschudi

• Practical Non-interactive Publicly Verifiable Secret Sharing with Thousands of Parties by Craig Gentry and Shai Halevi and Vadim Lyubashevsky

• Encryption to the Future: A Paradigm for Sending Secret Messages to Future (Anonymous) Committees by Matteo Campanelli and Bernardo David and Hamidreza Khoshakhlagh and Anders Konring and Jesper Buus Nielsen

• Efficient Zero-Knowledge Argument in Discrete Logarithm Setting: Sublogarithmic Proof or Sublinear Verifier by Hyeonbum Lee and Jae Hong Seo

• FRI with Bootleproof-IPA Verkle Trees for “non-native” arithmetic and shrinking reference string size by Izzy

• Function-private Conditional Disclosure of Secrets and Multi-evaluation Threshold Distributed Point Functions by Nolan Miranda, Foo Yee Yeo, Vipin Singh Sehrawat

• Asynchronous Data Dissemination and its Applications by Sourav Das and Zhuolun Xiang and Ling Ren

Articles

• FROST: Flexible Round-Optimized Schnorr Threshold Signatures | Coinbase

• Random Oracles in Cryptography | by Kobi Gurkan 

• Understanding Homomorphic Encryption | by Garvit Goel

• Understanding How Facebook Disappeared from the Internet | by Celso Martinho and Tom Strickx

• Exploring Simon's Algorithm with Daniel Simon | AWS Quantum Computing Blog | by Grant Salton, Daniel Simon, and Cedric Lin

Videos/Podcast

• ZK Podcast: Episode 200: SNARK Research & Pedagogy with Alessandro Chiesa 

• ZK Podcast: Episode 202: Stateless Ethereum & Verkle Tries with Dankrad Feist

• ZK Podcast: Episode 203: MPC and DAGs with Aleph Zero’s Adam Gagol & Matthew Niemerg 

• Reconfiguration Friendly Random Beacons - Aniket Kate 

• zkStudy Club: Subquadratic SNARGs in the Random Oracle Model with Eylon Yogev, TAU/BIU 

Blockchain Privacy in a TweetShell 

ETH Memes @EthereumMemes

zexe plonked into a mpc, hop'd into his turbogeth and sped past the verkle tries. he zksynced the gwei from the flashbot after it mev'd his bls sigs. he was snark'd & stateless but was replicating on ovm 2.0.. excerpt from my novel

Boaz Barak @boazbaraktcs

1/20 A 🧵 on public key cryptography, and its interaction with quantum computing. Spurred by a discussion w/ @jfitzsimons, @mattyhoban, @dabacon, @rdviii but more general. There is a fundamental gulf between public and private key encryption.

Bob McElrath @BobMcElrath

Blockstream eCash vs CommerceBlock Mercury statechain (thread): Similarities: 1. Both use standard denominations 2. Both require hitting a server for double spend protection 3. Both add privacy 4. Both use blind signatures so servers don't know who is transacting (1/4)

Sergey Gorbunov @sergey_nog

Have you ever wondered why Threshold ECDSA is painful, Threshold Schnorr is straightforward, and Threshold BLS is trivial? Here's an informal explanation:

Vulnerabilities

• Disclosure of recent vulnerabilities | Aztec Network

• Counter-Strike: Threshold Attack. Potential attack on threshold ECDSA | Velasblockchain

• Potential attack on threshold ECDSA prevented, counter-terrorists win! : r/cryptography 

• Cracking Random Number Generators using Machine Learning – Part 1: xorshift128 | ncc group

Guides and Resources

• Anatomy of a STARK, Part 0: Introduction | Alan Szepieniec

• Garbled Circuits: A Primer | Matan Hamilis

• https://github.com/arkworks-rs/r1cs-std/tree/master/src/fields/nonnative 

• Gentle introduction to NTRU cryptosystem (part 1) 

Tools 

• StarkWare Libs · GitHub

• ldsec/lattigo: A library for lattice-based homomorphic encryption in Go 

• https://github.com/kevinz917/zk-NFT

• https://github.com/sipa/writeups/tree/main/elligator-square-for-bn

Project Updates

• UniSync: a port of Uniswap V2 on the zkEVM | Matter Labs

• StarkNet Alpha is Coming to Mainnet  | StarkWare

• Ethereum Relayer Helps Aerospace Engineers Take Flight w/ Privacy App | Infura Blog | Mei Chan

• Dark Forest v0.6 Round 4 Wrapup | Dark Forest team

• Firo Research Update October 2021 | Reuben Yap

• Introducing plonkit | Fluidex

• Choose your character: an overview of Nym network actors | Nym Blog

• The Zcash Foundation's Q2 2021 Report | Zcash foundation Blog

• Reviving Halo 2 with Protocol Labs | Protocol Labs

• #Circom 2.0 is released! | Iden3 Blog

Events/Hackathons/TrustedSetups

• ZK HACK Online! Ongoing (every Tuesday until Dec 7!) 

• WAHC 2021 – 9th Workshop on Encrypted Computing & Applied Homomorphic Cryptography Seoul, South Korea. Nov 15, 2021

• Tokenomics 2021 Online. Nov 18-19, 2021

• 18th IMA International Conference on Cryptography and Coding Online. Dec 14-15, 2021

• Real World Crypto 2022 Amsterdam. Jan 10–12, 2022

• The Science of Blockchain Conference 2022 (SBC'22) Stanford. Jan 20-22

• Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2021 March 1-5 2022

• ETHBarcelona Q1 2022

Jobs: 

• ZK Jobs Board - open jobs 

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

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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! 

- Mikerah, Yahsin, Mariana and Anna