Hossein Hafezi @RandomString00

@GiacomoFenzi @zeroknowledgefm @IACReurocrypt I'm down to watch Bayern vs PSG on the night of the 6th too :D

🔥🔥🔥 Get ready for #ZKProof 2026! Speaker: Hossein Hafezi @RandomString00 from @nyuniversity Join us in Rome, May 9-10 to discuss the latest in ZKPs and applications, the Quantum threat, formal verification in ArkLib, IOPs & more. For more details - link in the first comment

@ar4nar من با اینکه اقامت اسپانیا دارم، دو هفته پیش لب مرز EU از UK ده دقیقه ازم سوال های چرت پرت میپرسیدن…

Announcing the preliminary program for Cedarcrypt — our inaugural applied cryptography summer school and conference, July 13–16, 2026 at the American University of Beirut - Mediterraneo in Paphos, Cyprus! We've put together a program we're genuinely proud of — a pedagogical progression from accessible foundations to state-of-the-art constructions, featuring lectures, hands-on workshops, and research talks from leading voices across academia and industry. The program spans everything from accessible foundations to cutting-edge research: Bart Preneel (KU Leuven) opens with a keynote, followed by deep dives into FHE with Emad Heydari Beni (Nokia Bell Labs), state-of-the-art hash-based SNARKs with Giacomo Fenzi (EPFL), and Zero-Knowledge Proofs with Tarek Galal (TU Berlin). Practitioners will hear from Zeke Hunter-Green how The Guardian built their anonymous whistleblowing system (CoverDrop + MLS), and a host of other guest speakers who will help attendees learn post-quantum migration strategies across lattices, isogenies, and codes, and get hands-on with threshold signing, MPC engineering, and constant-time programming — all in four days on the Mediterranean coast. Organized in collaboration with the IACR, and hosted on Cyprus's Mediterranean coast — a UNESCO World Heritage city where you can step from a workshop on threshold signing straight to a seaside taverna. Thanks to our generous sponsors — Electi, PQShield, Symbolic Software, Zama, and several anonymous donors — we're offering FULL SCHOLARSHIPS (travel + lodging) to students and early-career researchers, awarded on a rolling basis until funds are exhausted. Graduate students, early-career researchers, and practitioners in applied cryptography: we built this for you! Join us this July in sunny Paphos! Let's make this an inaugural event to remember!

@AbdelStark Groth16 has a statistical zero-knowledge; even if you break the soundness with a Q-machine later, the historical proofs still do not reveal anything about the past.

As a recent PC chair, I can confirm that this will be a real problem in a few months.

Liyi Zhou @lzhou1110

3 months ago

We may be entering a death spiral in academic peer review. x.com/lzhou1110/stat…

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Kinda reflects the state of the job market everywhere:

Thomas Van Riet @ThomasVanRiet2

4 months ago

350 applicants for a PhD position in theoretical physics. It grows every time. Not just in Leuven, but everywhere.

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@archi_tradition Madrid forever!

Hi everyone! 👋 We're running a brief anonymous survey on how cryptographers and security researchers view the potential quantum threat, for a research project. We'd really appreciate your input! forms.gle/6wDL65dRPb5JSu… Thanks so much! 🙏

@wadg Thanks! I haven't looked into Kimchi before, but this applies to any proof system whose cost is dominated by MSMs over a fixed base (so not Bulletproof-style systems). It works for Plonk and HyperPlonk (with KZG), Nova, HyperNova, KZH-fold, Groth, etc.

1) We present the first truly private, single-server zkSNARK delegation scheme for well-known group-based zkSNARKs such as Groth16, Plonk, and Nova. Our core idea is to delegate the prover’s most expensive computation—namely, the MSM—to a single server.

@MMJahanara Let me know!! What ultimately matters is the computational power of the server/client, e.g. with a single-threaded client we saw up to a 40× speedup. Also with GPU-accelerated hardware, the server could be another 5× faster...

@thefrozenfire We had the network bandwidth in our protocol considered, but right we ignored costs such as serialisation, thanks for the suggestion!

2) While we maintain strong privacy guarantees. Unlike all prior works (including multi-server settings), our proofs are unlinkable to the client–server interaction, making the scheme suitable for privacy-critical applications, such as Zcash.

This new paper looks very cool. I was never a fan of delegation schemes requiring you to secret share the witness between servers. Here there is a nice idea of how to privatey delegate an MSM to one server using the learning parity with noise assumption. eprint.iacr.org/2025/2113.pdf

@alinush But, we've found a gap in research for efficient schemes supporing large unstructured tables. Schemes like CQ require a significant amount of preprocessing, i.e. impractical for tables larger than 2^30. Fortunately, most tables in practice are structured and decomposable though

@alinush Honestly, I'd say it really depends on the underlying table, whether you, e.g. if it's a structure table, then you can decompose it into smaller tables, then table-dependent approaches like plookup would be okay!

(1) In this paper, we provide a unified framework for lookup table arguments, considering some overlooked aspects such as projectiveness and different modes of compatibility with proof systems.

@thee_harbinger لوکیشن دقیق ش کجاست؟

(4) We also provide an excellent survey of existing techniques categorised into four families: (i) multi-hash based ones, (ii) logup based (iii) subvector extraction (matrix-vector) and (iv) polynomial processing.

(3) We point out some important gaps, such as a lack of a lookup scheme with moderate preprocessing and efficiency for unstructured tables, etc.