Zero Knowledge

This week, we explore the Fractal transparent SNARK construction with its authors Dev Ojha and Nick Spooner - both students of Alessandro Chiesa at UC Berkeley. We explore how Fractal works, how it improves on some of the earlier work on Sonic and Marlin, how it borrows from but differentiates itself from STARKs, as well as what they discovered while working on this paper about recursive SNARKs and what makes that property possible. Here is some of the material we touch on: Fractal Paper Ariel Gabizon's episode Eli Ben-sasson's episode Marlin Paper Digging into recursive snarks Latest recursive SNARKitecture with Izaak Meckler from O(1)Labs Thank you to this week's sponsor Trail of Bits Just recently, a critical vulnerability was found in the certificate validation functionality on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016/2019 This bug allows attackers to break the validation of trust in a wide variety of contexts, such as HTTPS and code signing - Trail of Bits has developed a PoC exploit and pu