Consensus - loosely defined as global agreement on the state of a decentralised network across its mutually untrusting participants - is an essential ingredient for decentralisation. At the same time, its scalability remains the Achilles' heel of ...

Parallel computation is an important aspect of multi-party computation, not only in terms of improving efficiency, but also in terms of providing privacy for computation involving conditional branching based on private data. While applying multi-party ...

An accumulator is a cryptographic primitive that allows a prover to succinctly commit to a set of values while being able to provide proofs of (non-)membership. A batch proof is an accumulator proof that can be used to prove (non-)membership of multiple ...

Recent works on interactive zero-knowledge (ZK) protocols provide a new paradigm with high efficiency and scalability. However, these protocols suffer from high communication overhead, often linear to the circuit size. In this paper, we proposed two new ...

We provide optimized range proofs, called Sharp, in discrete logarithm and hidden order groups, based on square decomposition. In the former setting, we build on the paradigm of Couteau et al. (Eurocrypt '21) and optimize their range proof (from now on, ...

The design of zkSNARKs is increasingly complicated and requires familiarity with a broad class of cryptographic and algebraic tools. This complexity in zkSNARK design also increases the difficulty in zkSNARK implementation, analysis, and optimization. ...

Recent advances in fast protocols for vector oblivious linear evaluation (VOLE) have inspired a family of new VOLE-based lightweight designated-verifier NIZK protocols (Weng et al., S&P 2021, Baum et al., Crypto 2021, Dittmer et al., ITC 2021, Yang et ...

Private set intersection (PSI) is one of the most extensively studied instances of secure computation. PSI allows two parties to compute the intersection of their input sets without revealing anything else. Other useful variants include PSI-Payload, ...

Forward-secure encryption (FS-PKE) is a key-evolving public-key paradigm that preserves the confidentiality of past encryptions in case of key exposure. Updatable public-key encryption (UPKE) is a natural relaxation of FS-PKE, introduced by Jost et al. (...

Sharding is an emerging technique to overcome scalability issues on blockchain based public ledgers. Without sharding, every node in the network has to listen to and process all ledger protocol messages. The basic idea of sharding is to parallelize the ...

Zero-knowledge (ZK) protocols enable one party to prove to others that it knows a fact without revealing any information about the evidence for such knowledge. There exist ZK protocols for all problems in NP, and recent works developed highly efficient ...

Zero-Knowledge protocols have increasingly become both popular and practical in recent years due to their applicability in many areas such as blockchain systems. Unfortunately, public verifiability and small proof sizes of zero-knowledge protocols ...

The classic asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) framework of Ben-Or, Kemler, and Rabin (BKR) and its descendants rely on reliable broadcast (RBC) and asynchronous binary agreement (ABA). However, BKR does not allow all ABA instances to run in ...