MPC & ZK in Ligero and Ligetron

Summary In this week’s episode https://twitter.com/annarrose (Anna) and https://x.com/kobigurk (Kobi) chat with https://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/muthuv/ (Muthu Venkitasubramaniam) and https://www.eng.biu.ac.il/hazay/ (Carmit Hazay) from https://ligero-inc.com (Ligero). They discuss their work on MPC and ZK for the last 20 years and how the research has evolved. They then dive into a nuanced conversation on how MPC and ZK are interrelated. The discuss Ligero, what led to the project and the early phases, as well as the new https://ligetron.com/ (Ligetron) system and how they plan on getting this technology into the wild. Here’s some additional links for this episode: https://ligero-inc.com (Ligero) https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1608 (Ligero: Lightweight Sublinear Arguments Without a Trusted Setup by Ames, Hazay, Ishai and Venkitasubramaniam) https://ligetron.com/ (Ligetron by Ligero) https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings-article/sp/2024/313000a086/1RjEaU3iZEY (Ligetron: Lightweight Scalable End-to-End Zero-Knowledge Proofs. Post-Quantum ZK-SNARKs on a Browser by Wang, Hazay and Venkitasubramaniam) https://personal.utdallas.edu/~mxk055100/courses/privacy08f_files/ldiversity.pdf (ℓ-Diversity: Privacy Beyond k-Anonymity by Machanavajjhala, Gehrke, Kifer and Venkitasubramaniam) https://www.eng.biu.ac.il/~hazay/Conferences/Pailler.pdf (Efficient RSA Key Generation and Threshold Paillier in the Two-Party Setting by Hazay, Mikkelsen, Rabin, Toft and Nicolosi) https://meshcal.com/ (MeshCal.com) https://web.cs.ucla.edu/~rafail/PUBLIC/77.pdf (Zero-Knowledge from Secure Multiparty Computation by Ishai, Kushilevitz, Ostrovsky and Sahai) https://crypto.sjtu.edu.cn/cis2018/files/CIS18-Carmit1.pdf (Introduction to MPC-in-the-Head by Carmit Hazay) https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/163.pdf (ZKBoo: Faster Zero-Knowledge for Boolean Circuits by Giacomelli, Madsen and Orlandi) https://zeroknowledge.fm/322-2/ (Episode 322: Definitions, Security and Sumcheck in ZK Systems with Justin Thaler) https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/129712.129780 (Communication complexity of secure computation by Franklin and Yung) ZK Hack Montreal has been announced for Aug 9 - 11! Apply to join the hackathon here. http://aleo.org/ (Aleo) is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup. As Aleo is gearing up for their mainnet launch in Q1, this is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK journey. Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/ (http://aleo.org/) If you like what we do: Find all our links here! https://linktr.ee/zeroknowledge (@ZeroKnowledge | Linktree) Subscribe to our https://zeroknowledge.substack.com (podcast newsletter) Follow us on Twitter https://twitter.com/zeroknowledgefm (@zeroknowledgefm) Join us on https://zeroknowledge.fm/telegram (Telegram) Catch us on https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYWsYz5cKw4wZ9Mpe4kuM_g (YouTube)