zkMesh: May 2024 recap

Welcome to zkMesh, a monthly newsletter covering the latest in advanced privacy-enhancing cryptography, distributed protocol development, and zero knowledge systems research. 

zkMesh is produced by ZK Hack.

We bring you recent research, useful articles, videos, podcasts, tweets, tools, project updates, and events. Expect a new edition every month. Be sure to share and subscribe!

** ZK Hack Montréal is happening on Aug 9 - 11 (APPLY TO JOIN US) **

Research

• zkSNARKs in the ROM with Unconditional UC-Security by Alessandro Chiesa and Giacomo Fenzi

• Clap: a Rust eDSL for PlonKish Proof Systems with a Semantics-preserving Optimizing Compiler by Marco Stronati, Denis Firsov, Antonio Locascio and Benjamin Livshits

• Vision Mark-32: ZK-Friendly Hash Function Over Binary Tower Fields by Tomer Ashur, Mohammad Mahzoun, Jim Posen and Danilo Šijačić

• The Ouroboros of ZK: Why Verifying the Verifier Unlocks Longer-Term ZK Innovation by Denis Firsov and Benjamin Livshits

• Relativized Succinct Arguments in the ROM Do Not Exist by Annalisa Barbara, Alessandro Chiesa and Ziyi Guan

• On amortization techniques for FRI-based SNARKs by Albert Garreta, Hayk Hovhanissyan, Aram Jivanyan, Ignacio Manzur, Isaac Villalobos and Michał Zając

• SigmaSuite: How to Minimize Foreign Arithmetic in ZKP Circuits While Keeping Succinct Final Verification by Wyatt Benno

• Large-Scale MPC: Scaling Private Iris Code Uniqueness Checks to Millions of Users by Remco Bloemen, Daniel Kales, Philipp Sippl and Roman Walch

• The Brave New World of Global Generic Groups and UC-Secure Zero-Overhead SNARKs by Jan Bobolz, Pooya Farshim, Markulf Kohlweiss and Akira Takahashi

• Zero-knowledge IOPs Approaching Witness Length by Noga Ron-Zewi and Mor Weiss

• Doubly-Efficient Batch Verification in Statistical Zero-Knowledge by Or Keret, Ron D. Rothblum and Prashant Nalini Vasudevan

• PERK: Compact Signature Scheme Based on a New Variant of the Permuted Kernel Problem by Slim Bettaieb, Loïc Bidoux, Victor Dyseryn, Andre Esser, Philippe Gaborit, Mukul Kulkarni and Marco Palumbi

• Proxying is Enough: Security of Proxying in TLS Oracles and AEAD Context Unforgeability by Zhongtang Luo, Yanxue Jia, Yaobin Shen and Aniket Kate

• Real-world Universal zkSNARKs are non-malleable by Antonio Faonio, Dario Fiore and Luigi Russo

• An Efficient and Extensible Zero-knowledge Proof Framework for Neural Networks by Tao Lu, Haoyu Wang, Wenjie Qu, Zonghui Wang, Jinye He, Tianyang Tao, Wenzhi Chen and Jiaheng Zhang

• Succinct Functional Commitments for Circuits from k-Lin by Hoeteck Wee and David J. Wu

• Privacy-Preserving Blueprints via Succinctly Verifiable Computation over Additively-Homomorphically Encrypted Data by Scott Griffy, Markulf Kohlweiss, Anna Lysyanskaya and Meghna Sengupta

Articles/Threads

• ZK Hack Kraków Recap Article  | ZK Hack

• ZK Industry Leaders Condemn Matter Labs and Side With Polyhedra in ZK Ticker Debate | Unchained 

• Response from Matter Labs about the ZK Trademark 

• How Do Layer 2s Really Differ From Execution Sharding? | Vitalik Buterin

• A Zero Knowledge Paradigm: Part 1 - What is a zk-VM? | Lita

• Building ZK passport-based voting  | Rarimo

• Decentralization Isn't A Meme (Part 1) | Aztec

• Verifiable FHE Bootstrapping using SNARKs | Zama

• Modular vs. Monolithic Is Dead | =nil; Foundation

• The U.S. Government’s Hypocritical Case Against Tornado Cash  | Coindesk

• Optimizing ZK-Rollup Scalability, Security, and Censorship Resistance with Epidemic MPC, Efficient Data Structures, and Advanced Cryptographic Techniques | EthResearch forum

• Approaching Constant: The Race for The Fastest Zero-Knowledge Proof System | ICME

• You Should Design Trust Infrastructure | Tonk

• Disrupting Tech, Verify Don't Trust, Recipes for SNARKs | a16z crypto

Videos/Podcasts

• Definitions, Security and Sumcheck in ZK Systems with Justin Thaler | Zero Knowledge Podcast

• Discovering New Elliptic Curves with Antonio Sanso and Youssef El Housni | Zero Knowledge Podcast

• Web Proofs with Tracy from Pluto | Zero Knowledge Podcast

• MPC & ZK in Ligero and Ligetron | Zero Knowledge Podcast

• Accumulation w/o Homomorphism (Wilson Nguyen - Stanford, William Wang - NYU) | zkStudyClub

• ZK Accelerate Athens: Recap & Link Hub | Ingonyama

• Discussion Panel at L3 Summit ETHDenver: zkEVM vs zkVM – Use Cases, Challenges and the Future | ETHDenver

• Paul Lou: Hard Languages in NP ∩ coNP​​ and NIZK Proofs from Unstructured Hardness | CMU Cylab Crypto Seminar

• Theory to Code: Building the Breakthrough zkVM Jolt | a16z crypto

• Talks and Panel Explaining Zero-Knowledge Proofs to a Technical Audience | ZK Dive in NYC

Guides and Resources

• Building Cryptographic Proofs from Hash Functions | Alessandro Chiesa & Eylon Yogev

• MoonMath Study Group | ZK Hack

• WTF-zk Tutorials |  WTFAcademy

• BrainSTARK: Design a Turing-complete zk-STARK Engine | @aszepieniec

• Notes on Collaborative zk-SNARKs | Leku

• Zero-Knowledge Proof of SHA256 Hash Using zkSNARK | Binod Karunanayake

Vulnerabilities/Disclosures

• Breaking the smartbean paper | Ariel, Liam

• Vulnerability Report: Binance PoR Dummy User Attack | Leku

• ETHDam(n) | MACI

• Meet Recon, Your Web3 Security Guardian | Web3sec News

• Advanced Formal Verification of ZKP: A Tale of Two Bugs | CertiK

• Length Extension Attacks | @0xtiagofneto

Tools/Implementations

• Using Folding Schemes For A Provable Bitcoin Light Client | @xyz_pierre

• Open-Binius: Building Blocks for Accelerating ZK proofs Over Binary Fields | Ingonyama

• Build a ZK Application | Ligero 

Project Updates

• Succinct’s SP1, Built with Polygon Plonky3 … for the Agg Layer | Polygon

• Taiko Is Live On Ethereum Mainnet! | Taiko

• Announcing Lita's Valida zkVM & C Compiler | Lita

• zkSharding for Ethereum | =nil; Foundation

• Building a Truly Dark Dark Pool | Sunscreen

• Proving new worlds with zkTLS | Telah 

• A Year of ZK Security | zkSecurity

• Leveraging ZKPs to Address Privacy Challenges in RWA Tokenization | NovaNet

• Zeth Brings Validity Proofs to Optimism's OP Stack | RISC Zero

• Introducing SNARKnado | Alpen Labs

• Verifying RISC Zero’s Trusted Setup Ceremony | RISC Zero

• Security Auditing Summary: Zero-knowledge Virtual Machine (zkVM)  | RISC Zero 

• Introducing Steel | RISC Zero

• Introducing ZaKi | Ingonyama

• The Importance of Liquidity on Linea | Linea

• SP1 Testnet Launch: The Fastest, Feature-complete zkVM for Developers | Succinct Labs

• ZKThreads: A canonical ZK sharding framework for dApps | StarkWare 

• ZKBoost: A Novel XGBoost Model for ZKML | Giza

• A Framework for Heterogenous Proof Aggregation | Rize Labs

• How Can a General-Purpose zkVM Achieve Network Effects? | ZKM

• How Horizen is Redefining Blockchain with Zero-Knowledge Proofs | Horizon Labs

• The Next Chapter for Lagrange | Lagrange Labs

• Ola: More Than Infrastructure – A New Gateway Connecting Web2 and Web3 Worlds | Ola

• Digital Identity: Solving the Privacy Problem with Zero Knowledge Proofs | Mina Protocol

Events/Hackathons

• ETH Prague | Prague, Czech Republic. May 31 - June 2

• EthCC | Brussels, Belgium. July 8 - 11

• Encryption Day | Brussels, Belgium. July 9

• ZK Hack Meetup #5 | Brussels, Belgium. July 9

• ETHGlobal Brussels | Brussels, Belgium. July 12 - 14

• ZK Hack Montréal | Montréal, Canada. Aug 9 - 11 (APPLY NOW!)

• ETHWarsaw | Warsaw, Poland. September 5 - 8

• ETHGlobal Singapore | Singapore. September 20 - 22

• zkSummit12 | Lisbon, Portugal. Oct 8  (SAVE THE DATE)

• ETHGlobal San Francisco | San Francisco, US. October 18 - 20

• DevCon | Bangkok, Thailand. November 12 - 15

• ETHGlobal Bangkok | Bangkok, Thailand. November 15 - 17

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Lastly, if you have something you think should be included in the next edition or suggestions for the format, tweet at us @__zkhack__!