Zero Knowledge

In this week’s episode, Anna (https://twitter.com/annarrose) and Kobi (https://twitter.com/kobigurk) chat with Gal Arnon (https://galarnon42.github.io/), Ph.D student from the Weizmann Institute of Science (https://weizmann.ac.il/pages/) & Giacomo Fenzi (https://twitter.com/GiacomoFenzi), Ph.D. student in the COMPSEC Lab (https://compsec.epfl.ch/) at EPFL (https://epfl.ch/). Gal and Giacomo are amongst the co-authors of ‘STIR: Reed–Solomon Proximity Testing with Fewer Queries’ (https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/390) and in this conversation, they discuss how their research led them to work on these topics and where the thesis for this particular work sparked from. They set the stage by exploring the history of FRI and discussing some hidden nuances in how FRI works. And then they introduce STIR, a system that can be used in place of FRI, which incorporates various optimisations to improve the performance. Here’s some additional links for this episode: FRIDA: Data Availability Sampling from FRI by Hall-Andersen,