Introduction to zkSNARKs | BIMSA General Lecture

Abstract

Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge (zkSNARKs) have been a hot topic lately because they are one of the essential tools for building privacy-preserving blockchain applications. zkSNARKs enable one party (the prover) to prove to another party (the verifier) that a statement is true, without revealing other information apart from the fact that the statement is true. They can be used to empower cryptocurrency transaction privacy, confidential smart contract, identity authentication, supplychain management, private healthcare system, etc.

The journey of investigating zkSNARKs can be traced back to when Goldwasser, Micali and Roacknoff first introduced the zero-knowledge interactive proof system, which enables a prover to convince a verifier that a statement is true, without revealing the witness [GMR89].

Since then, lots of work has been done to make zkSNARK practical. In this presentation, we are going to have an overview of arithmetization, zkSNARK protocol design and implementation.

Speaker Intro

Guiwen Luo is a postdoc at the University of Waterloo. Before that, He was a PhD student in the ComSec lab at the University of Waterloo under the supervision of Prof. Guang Gong. He earned his MASc in Institute of Information Engineering from Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received his BS in Faculty of Mathematics from Fudan University. He is now working on pairing-based cryptography, zkSNARKs & privacy-preserving blockchains. You may visit his homepage https://luoguiwen.github.io/Guiwen-Luo/ to find out more.