Pratyush Mishra

Tbf most cryptographers I know (including me!) have never picked a lock!

Abstract. We introduce Coral, a system for proving in zero- knowledge that a committed byte stream corresponds to a structured object in accordance to a Context Free Grammar. Once a prover establishes the validity of the parsed object with Coral, they can selectively prove facts about the object—such as fields in Web API responses or in JSON Web Tokens—–to third parties or blockchains. Coral reduces the problem of correct parsing to a few simple checks over a left-child right-sibling tree and introduces a novel segmented memory abstraction that unifies and extends prior constructions for RAM in zkSNARKs. Our implementation of Coral runs on a standard laptop, and non-interactively proves the parsing of real Web responses (JSON) and files (TOML and C) in seconds. The resulting proofs are small and cheap to verify.

Coral: Fast Succinct Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge CFG Proofs (Sebastian Angel, Sofía Celi, Elizabeth Margolin, Pratyush Mishra, Martin Sander, Jess Woods) ia.cr/2025/1420

YouTube video by Benn Jordan I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird

Holy shit. This guy saved a PNG to a bird.

(he drew a bird into a spectrogram, played that sound to a starling, and the starling reproduced it back to him with enough accuracy he got his bird drawing back in their call's spectrogram) www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQC...

Help me save my family and escape from Gaza to Eygpt My name is Alaa, and I am a mother of three precious children: Musa, who is 12 years old, and my twin daughters, Ella and Ellen, who are 8 years old. Before October 7th, our lives were filled with hop...

Please support @mamatwins.bsky.social They are all losing weight, and today Alaa is very sick, connected to an IV. I know things are hard everywhere, but the pressure has made small amounts of aid trickle in, we need to keep supporting them while keeping the pressure up.

There’s also other considerations beyond one’s own job. Eg, what happens to your PhD students? Even if you as faculty can quit immediately, your students can’t necessarily. International PhD students could get their statuses revoked, etc.

All I’m saying is that it’s not something that happens immediately, and even if it did, not necessarily in a way that’s publicly announced.

The point is that it’s not just something you do at the drop of a hat

yes, that's why we're okay with this in practice. But from a theoretical perspective, our definitions are written like "For all efficient adversaries, Pr[collision ← A] = astronomically-tiny", i.e. we have to take into consideration the (very dumb and hard-to-find) adversary from earlier

And also eprint.iacr.org/2006/281

Multi-Collision Resistance: A Paradigm for Keyless Hash Functions We introduce a new notion of multi-collision resistance for keyless hash functions. This is a natural relaxation of collision resistance where it is hard to find multiple inputs with the same hash in ...

There is actually some work on trying to handle such "unkeyed" hashes also: eprint.iacr.org/2017/488

The point is that because we know that collisions exist, we also know that there is a trivial algorithm that finds at least one collision: the one that hardcodes those collisions! Of course, finding this algorithm is not necessarily (and in fact is unlikely to be) easy, but it certainly does exist!

I just skimmed it yesterday, but looks like a real tour-de-force!

For the 1st time since the mid-20th c, a major urban US transit network is going to be largely destroyed.

Philadelphia’s SEPTA must cut 45% of service, starting NEXT MONTH.

45% is not “waste fraud and abuse.” It’s “would you like to keep your heart or your lungs?”

wwww.septa.org/fundingcrisis/

Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social • 1h • Bluesky Elder The same Supreme Court that tripped over itself in a rush to stop Biden's student-loan forgiveness plan in 2023 signs off on Trump's plan to illegally dismantle the Dept. of Education two years later: www.supremecourt.gov/ opinions/24p... https://www.supremecourt.gov/ opinions/24pdf/24a1203_pol1.pdf @ www.supremecourt.gov 10 137 О 396. Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social Follow Bluesky Elder This (along with other recent shadow-docket rulings on the civil service) is great news for the next Democratic president, who can now fire every ICE agent on day one without a single vote in Congress. July 14, 2025 at 2:59 PM

This is hopium of the worst kind that downplay the reality that the elections of 26 and 28 are not a given, and that rule of law does not matter under a fascist government Only the rule of power and traditional law holds no power where this is going.

unsolved millennium prize problems are just evidence that the problems are wrongly priced. if they gradually raise the reward money, eventually the supply and demand will match and a solution will arise. its just economics

It feels significant to note that the grievances driving the fascist right, and significantly so for the tech-fascists, are completely fabricated delusions

One time I was on a plane back home to Bahrain and a US soldier was sitting next to me. We spoke no words to each other except at the end of the flight when he helped me with something and I said “Thank you”. He responded with “you speak great English!”

The result is cool, but the reporting is a bit hyperbolic…

Wow I had no idea he passed. I never met him, and am only a (very amateur) hobbyist in Indian history, but his work Greater Magadha was incredibly thought-provoking, and, personally, really opened my eyes to the possibility of alternate histories

Thinking about Johannes Bronkhorst (UPDATED) On May 15, Harry Falk announced on the Indology mailing list that Johannes Bronkhorst had “left this world”. In the following weeks the mailing list (and, I am sure, other online forums) has been virt...

In memory of Johannes Bronkhorst:
elisafreschi.com/2025/07/09/4...

the mayor of Philadelphia makes MORE MONEY than the mayor of NYC (s city of 12+ million) and yet she’s sitting on Twitter negging our city workers instead of hammering out a fair contract

Rufo RTs Cremieux: The story is here. We caught Zohran Mamdani applying to Columbia... As a Black man.

worth noting the pipeline here:
* Trump-supporting anons hack Columbia data
* Nazi twitter accounts dig around in the data
* NYT picks up on Nazi substack posts, publishes Zohran story to damage his campaign
* Chris Rufo immediately boosting the story

Michael is an insanely talented compiler developer and certainly top 5 most knowledgeable people in the word re: the Rust compiler. Anyone in the city with an appetite for Rust compiler development should absolutely give him a call.

And, as usual, it will not help with anything because now Trump and his cronies know that they Penn will capitulate (like Columbia)

Shameful capitulation by Penn. Just gross.

This is disgusting.

Incredibly cowardly from Penn:

titleixoffice.upenn.edu/about/title-...