Privacy and Scaling Explorations

This post was authored by the Circom MPC research team. Circom-MPC is a PSE Research project that enables the use of the Circom language to develop MPC applications. In this project, we envisioned MPC as a broader paradigm, where MPC serves as an umbrella for generic techniques such as Zero-Knowledge Proof, Garbled Circuit, Secret-Sharing, or Fully Homomorphic Encryption. Throughout this research the team produced some valuable resources and insights, including:Implementation of circom-2-arit...

This post was written by the PSE Trusted Setup Team.Chronological look backEarly Stages and FoundationPSE’s Trusted Setups team began two years ago with a focus on understanding and implementing trusted setup ceremonies, which are crucial in generating secure cryptographic keys for production-ready zkSNARKs circuits. The team was formed to continue work on ongoing projects as well as starting to work on new initiatives. In a trusted setup ceremony, multiple participants collaborate to compute...

This post was written by PSE grantee Vishal Kulkarni.IntroductionKey conceptsCertificate Transparency Certificate Transparency (CT) is a standard for verifying digital certificates such as those used by websites secured by HTTPS. CT employs a transparent log of certificates issued by a trusted Certificate authority (CA), which anyone can check to verify that a certificate is valid (for most people surfing the web, this is done automatically by the browser).If you've ever seen this screen...

This post was authored by the Summa team.History and Goals of the projectThe Summa project began in March of 2023 in response to the collapse of FTX months prior. It aimed to solve an issue that has plagued centralized exchanges since the Mt Gox collapse in 2013; how can users be assured that the funds they entrust to the exchange are going to be available when they choose to withdrawal them? The goal was to create software that helps centralized exchanges (CEX’s) provide auditor-less and pri...

This post was written by PSE researcher Pierre and originally posted on his personal blog. Thanks to the Intmax team for their helpful review on this post!Intmax has been pioneering L2 transaction-only constructions based on client-side validation (CSV), where transaction validation relies on cryptographic proofs rather than blockchain consensus rules. Data is intermittently posted on a dedicated blockchain, primarily for deposits, withdrawals, and account checkpoints. The Intmax2 paper is an...

This post was written by the AnonKlub team. One year and half ago, we embarked on an ambitious journey to explore the potential of zk-ECDSA in bringing enhanced privacy to the Ethereum ecosystem. This research initiative was introduced to the community through a blog post detailing the state of zk-ECDSA and its promising applications. As our research progressed and we began to develop practical implementations, our project evolved and was eventually rebranded as AnonKlub. This name change ref...

This post was written by PSE researcher Enrico Bottazzi. Thanks to Pia Park for discussions and reviews. In this post, we’ll explore why building secure multi-party applications, which aim to compute a function over inputs from different parties while keeping those inputs private, is impossible today. We use Multi-party Trade Credit Set-off (MTCS) as an example, showing how technologies like multi-party computation and fully homomorphic encryption fall short of perfect security due to a funda...

This post was written by PSE researcher Miha Stopar. Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is important because it addresses the potential threat posed by quantum computers to classical cryptographic systems. Quantum computers leverage the principles of quantum mechanics to perform calculations exponentially faster than classical computers in certain cases. Two algorithms, in particular, pose significant threats:Shor’s Algorithm: Efficiently solves integer factorization and discrete logarithm probl...

This post was written by Vivian Jeng, a developer on the Mopro team. Mopro is a toolkit designed to make mobile proving simple and efficient. With the growing dominance of mobile app users over web app users, and the observation that snarkjs is less performant compared to native provers like rapidsnark, we recognized the need to optimize proving speed for mobile devices. To address this, one of Mopro's primary goals is to evaluate various provers across different platforms to identify th...

This post was written by PSE researcher Miha Stopar. There's no doubt that lattice-based cryptography is currently the most promising branch of post-quantum cryptography. Not only is it highly performant and versatile, it also provides the only known technique to achieve fully homomorphic encryption. One reason lattice-based cryptography is so fast is that it can be heavily vectorized. This contrasts noticeably with isogeny-based cryptography, which offers far fewer opportunities for par...

This post was written by PSE researcher Rasul Ibragimov. Big thanks to Lev Soukhanov for explaining the majority of this to me - without him, this blog post wouldn't exist.AbstractRecent development of protocols, that allow us to make Web2 data portable & verifiable such as ZK Email or TLSNotary opens new use-cases and opportunities for us. For example, we can make proof of ownership of some x.com username or email address and verify it on-chain with ZK Email. Projects like OpenPassport,...

This post was written by 0xZoey, with contributions from Chance.IntroductionSelf-Sovereign Identity (SSI) and its implementation through decentralized ledgers represents one of blockchain technology's most promising applications, particularly within the Ethereum ecosystem. While SSI adoption faces both technical and social challenges, this article focuses specifically on the advancement of privacy-preserving cryptographic primitives essential to its implementation. Similar to decentraliz...