Ron Rothblum on Fiat-Shamir Attacks, Flock and SNARK.fast

This week, Anna and Kobi are joined by Ron Rothblum, Professor of Computer Science at Technion and researcher at Succinct. They catch up on Ron’s move from theory into practice, including his work on the SP1 zkVM, Jagged Polynomial Commitments, and a recent Fiat-Shamir attack that exposed vulnerabilities in practical uses of GKR. Ron explains what the attack revealed about Fiat-Shamir’s security assumptions and why it prompted changes to deployed systems.   The conversation then explores Ron’s recent work on faster and more efficient proof systems, from Blaze, TensorSwitch, BOLT and Veil to Flock, a proof system for batch proving Boolean computations. They discuss how new approaches to polynomial commitments and error-correcting codes can improve prover performance, before turning to snark.fast and zkGolf, experiments using AI agents to optimise provers and circuits. Ron shares what these efforts reveal about AI-assisted research and engineering, and how pushing proving closer to the speed of ordinary computation could unlock entirely new applications for verifiable computation.   Related Links

• Jagged Polynomial Commitments (or: How to Stack Multilinears)
• The Random Oracle Methodology, Revisited
• Blaze: Fast SNARKs from Interleaved RAA Codes
• TensorSwitch: Nearly Optimal Polynomial Commitments from Tensor Codes
• Flock: Fast Proving for Batch Boolean Computations
• VEIL: Lightweight Zero-Knowledge for Hash-Based Multilinear Proof Systems
• Bolt: Faster SNARKs from Sketched Codes
• zkGolf Website
• Proving as Fast as Computing: Succinct Arguments with Constant Prover Overhead
• SNARK.fast Website
• ZK Podcast Episode: Error Correcting Codes & Information Theory with Ron Rothblum
• Fiat-Shamir via List-Recoverable Codes (or: Parallel Repetition of GMW is not Zero-Knowledge)
• Delegating Computation: Interactive Proofs for Muggles
• How to Prove False Statements: Practical Attacks on Fiat-Shamir

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