2024-10-20 zk-insights Weekly

Highlights

The Sum-Check Protocol w/ Justin Thaler

In this module, Tracy Livengood and Justin Thaler provide a comprehensive introduction to the sum-check protocol and why it is so powerful, beginning with a catch-up on polynomials (univariate, multivariate, multilinear) as well as the important concept of multilinear extensions, and introduce the “equality” function. They go on to explain the mechanics of the sum-check protocol, detailing its goals and process, before walking us through the rounds of the protocol and demonstrating how it is applied. They then highlight the advantages of sum-check over other SNARK systems, and sketch the Spartan polynomial IOP. Toward the end, they delve into the Goldwasser, Kalai and Rothblum (GKR) protocol and discuss the trade-offs between this system and Spartan.

• <https://zkhack.dev/whiteboard/s2m2/>

  Deep dive into Circle-STARKs FFT

  @ignaciohagopian wrote an article explaining the rationale and the mechanics of the specific fast Fourier transform (FFT) defined in the Circle STARKs paper.

• <https://ihagopian.com/posts/deep-dive-into-circle-starks-fft>

  Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 1: The Merge

• <https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/14/futures1.html>

  Possible futures for the Ethereum protocol, part 2: The Surge

• <https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/17/futures2.html>

  Vac 101: Transforming an Interactive Protocol to a Noninteractive Argument

• <https://vac.dev/rlog/vac101-fiat-shamir/>

  Intro To Math Proofs (Full Course)

• <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3czgfHULZCs>

  A library for lattice-based multiparty homomorphic encryption in Go

• <https://github.com/tuneinsight/lattigo>

Updates

Plonky3 has gotten 2-4x faster, with M3 Max now proving ~1.7 million Poseidon2 hashes per second.

• <https://x.com/dlubarov/status/1845862467315920940>
• <https://x.com/_bfarmer/status/1845870877453455403>

  Overview of Circle STARKs

• <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xrpi-gO3IpI>

  Proof is in the Pudding 02: zkTLS

• <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4fylgnJRPE>

  ZK12: ZK on Bitcoin - Liam Eagen

• <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BM0dBtyLNNk>

  ZK12: Myth vs. Reality: Enhancing Proving Time in KZG-Backed Plonkish Systems for zkWASM - Sinka Gao

• <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFXWbYwqqbM&list=PLj80z0cJm8QFy2umHqu77a8dbZSqpSH54&index=15>

  House of ZK - Virtual Conference 1.0

• <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZFlugUR9Qc>

  Interview with Eli Ben-Sasson - HoZK Virtual Conference 1.0

• <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92EkOmij_Mo>

  ZK-SecreC

  Open sourced ZK-SecreC, a zero knowledge toolkit for building large proofs on computation. Imagine proving to someone that your health records don't have a diagnosis or that you have been staying in some are without leaking the source data.

• <https://x.com/danbogdanov/status/1847196941102318048>
• <https://github.com/zk-secrec/>

  On Distributed FRI-based Proof Generation

• <https://hackmd.io/@nil-research/rJ_NVyiRA>

Papers

Glacius: Threshold Schnorr Signatures from DDH with Full Adaptive Security

• <https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1628>

  Sparrow: Space-Efficient zkSNARK for Data-Parallel Circuits and Applications to Zero-Knowledge Decision Trees

• <https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1631>

  RPO-M31 and XHash-M31: Efficient Hash Functions for Circle STARKs

• <https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1635>

  Fiat-Shamir Goes Rational

• <https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1645>

  Curve Forests: Transparent Zero-Knowledge Set Membership with Batching and Strong Security

• <https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1647>

  One-Shot Native Proofs of Non-Native Operations in Incrementally Verifiable Computations

• <https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1651>

  Compressed $\Sigma$-protocol Theory from Sum-check

• <https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1654>

  Instance Compression, Revisited

• <https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1659>

  zkFFT: Extending Halo2 with Vector Commitments & More

• <https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1661>

  A Hidden-Bits Approach to Black-Box Statistical ZAPs from LWE

• <https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1663>

  Consensus on SNARK pre-processed circuit polynomials

• <https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1664>

  Multi-party Setup Ceremony for Generating Tokamak zk-SNARK Parameters

• <https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1671>

  Batch Range Proof: How to Make Threshold ECDSA More Efficient

• <https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1677>

  Blind zkSNARKs for Private Proof Delegation and Verifiable Computation over Encrypted Data

• <https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1684>

  GAPP: Generic Aggregation of Polynomial Protocols

• <https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1685>

  On pairing-friendly 2-cycles and SNARK-friendly 2-chains of elliptic curves containing a curve from a prime-order family

• <https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1697>

  Computational Analysis of Plausibly Post-Quantum-Secure Recursive Arguments of Knowledge

• <https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1698>

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• <https://paragraph.xyz/@zkinsights>

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• <https://www.youtube.com/@ZKPunk-Org>