Philipp Muens

ZKSecurity just dropped this truly awesome PlonK tutorial: plonk.zksecurity.xyz

Post-Quantum Readiness in EdDSA Chains The impending threat posed by large-scale quantum computers necessitates a reevaluation of signature schemes deployed in blockchain protocols. In particular, blockchains relying on ECDSA, such as Bitc...

This is an interesting read on how EdDSA's hash-based key derivation (RFC 8032) can be used to compute PQ-ZKPs for private key ownership proofs: eprint.iacr.org/2025/1368

This is good news as it allows for an easier transition towards Post Quantum secure cryptocurrencies.

Foundations of High-Speed Cryptography Course Start with a gentle introduction to core cryptographic primitives, explore the basics of hardware acceleration, and then apply them to build optimized systems with ICICLE.

Ingonyama just published the first three lessons of their "Foundations of High-Speed Cryptography" course 👀

www.ingonyama.com/foundations-...

That would be awesome!

For me first thing in the morning is checking the new publications on eprint.iacr.org (also followed arxiv.org/list/cs.CR/recent but there’s too much noise IMHO).

ZHE: Efficient Zero-Knowledge Proofs for HE Evaluations Homomorphic Encryption (HE) allows computations on encrypted data without decryption. It can be used where the users’ information are to be processed by an untrustful server, and has been a popular ch...

This paper looks really interesting:

eprint.iacr.org/2025/770

ZKPs for (F)HE Schemes based on Ring-LWE.

FHE + ZKPs are a dream combo.

YouTube video by Simons Institute Diamond iO: Lattice-Based Obfuscation without Bootstrapping from Functional Encryption, toward...

The recording of the Diamond iO talk by the Machina iO team that was held during the Simon Institute's "Obfuscation" workshop was just uploaded: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RcK...

This is a great paper that explains how to obtain indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) via recursive Functional Encryption: piazza.com/class_profil...

It's basically a simplified version of the [BV15] paper: eprint.iacr.org/2015/163

The Machina iO Team just published a blog post which serves as a great introduction to indistinguishability obfuscation (iO): machina-io.com/posts/unboxi...

Yehuda Lindell (Coinbase)_Coinbase's cb-mpc Open-Source Library YouTube video by [EthCC] Livestream 4

Coinbase MPC wallet library presentation at EthCC m.youtube.com/live/ppeyz_J...

The Longfellow ZK (Google-zk) Analysis of the longfellow-zk implementation, also known as google-zk, for MDOC/mdl selective disclosure of verifable credentials.

Interesting read about Google’s recent "longfellow-zk" implementation: news.dyne.org/longfellow-z...

Please keep us posted on how it went!

I’m using asdf and direnv which is an amazing combo IMHO.

I saw mise on HN a while ago and thought about switching to it, but I’m not sure if it’s worth it given the current setup I have.

YouTube video by Bill Buchanan OBE World-leaders in Cryptography: Ralph Merkle

What a great episode with the legend Ralph Merkle.

I came for the Cryptography and stayed for the insights into Cryonics and general life lessons.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=90py...

As I wrote before, the Podcast by @billatnapier.bsky.social is an absolute gem if you're interested in Cryptography.

Turns out there's currently an ongoing "Obfuscation" Workshop / Symposia hosted by the Simons Institute!

simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/ob...

They just uploaded the "Expedition to Obfustopia" video by Rachel Lin which IMHO is the best overview of the SoTA of iO: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PRU...

Really looking forward to get this implemented as an alternative to the CUDA FFT / NTT implementations out there.

Thanks to WebGPU it will be cross-platform and can even be compiled to WASM to run in the browser.

The idea is to use uniform buffers for the pre-computed twiddles (powers of omega / psi).

I had some issues with the address space layout (see comment in the shader code), but was able to fix it after some in-depth troubleshooting.

Once done, the data in the output buffer is copied into a mapped buffer so I can access it easily on the CPU side (a common pattern in WebGPU programming).

The uniform buffer is an interesting one as it allows one to define read-only "global variables" that are fast to access.

WGSL Shader code.

Right now it's just an e2e demo which does some simple calculations on floats.

However everything is in place so I can start to write shader code for the NTT / FFT.

The shader has 3 buffers in total. Two storage buffers (for input and output) and a uniform buffer for constants.

Result of running the shader code with WebGPU.

Got a first e2e implementation of a WebGPU Compute Shader up and running.

It's written in Zig and uses WebGPU via the Dawn project so I can run it on my MacBook's M1 GPU.

Output when running the zig build test command.

Been working hard to make my MacBook's M1 GPU Go Brr and run NTT on it.

~200 lines of Zig later and I got most of the basic plumbing done.

Not sure if the headache comes from my new glasses or the WebGPU API 😅

Lattice-based Obfuscation from NTRU and Equivocal LWE Indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) turns a program unintelligible without altering its functionality and is a powerful cryptographic primitive that captures the power of most known primitives. Rece...

Exactly 👌
The Diamond iO paper is the next thing I’ll dive into.

I started there but got overwhelmed with all the moving parts and decided to study the foundations first. This is where the video helped me a lot.

There’s also eprint.iacr.org/2025/1129 which I plan to look into afterwards.

DLS - Amit Sahai, "The Mathematics of Hiding Secrets in Software" Abstract:At least since the initial public proposal of public-key cryptography based on computational hardness conjectures (Diffie and Hellman, 1976), cryptographers have contemplated the possibility ...

For anyone interested in learning more about Indistinguishability Obfuscation (iO) I highly recommend watching this talk by Amit Sahai: mediaspace.illinois.edu/media/t/1_ur...

I scoured the internet for a good introduction to the topic and this is the best talk so far IMHO.

Nice website that lists MPC Deployments alongside a short writeup and additional resources to dive deeper into the respective deployment: mpc.cs.berkeley.edu

VCs Congratulating Themselves 👏👏👏 on X: "I might need to shut this account down. 😆 Nothing a VC can say will ever be more self-aggrandizing about the profession than this." / X I might need to shut this account down. 😆 Nothing a VC can say will ever be more self-aggrandizing about the profession than this.

Here’s one line of reasoning 😂: x.com/vcbrags/stat...

GitHub - primefactor-io/ntt: Implementation of the Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithms Implementation of the Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithms - primefactor-io/ntt

You can check out the code if you're curious how this looks like: github.com/primefactor-...

Also note the tests at the bottom of the respective files.

Thanks's to Zig's comptime we can use this parameter n to generate a type which holds empty arrays of length n that are used for subsequent computations.

No heap allocations are necessary because an array's max size is n.

Just optimized the NTT / FFT implementation and removed the allocator so that ZERO heap allocations are now performed.

This works because the degree of the cyclotomic polynomial / FFT vector length is a parameter (denoted as n) that's agreed upon in advance (i.e. not dynamic).

A list of real-world uses of differential privacy - Ted is writing things A list of practical deployments of differential privacy, along with their privacy parameters.

Good overview with real-world uses of Differential Privacy: desfontain.es/blog/real-wo...

The same author also wrote a nice intro to Differential Privacy: desfontain.es/blog/friendl...

Excited to dive into this new iO paper.

Another interesting construction is "Diamond iO" from the PSE Team: eprint.iacr.org/2025/236

Really important effort.

Consider donating or becoming a member if you care about privacy and the future of the internet in general.

YouTube video by Branch Education How do Graphics Cards Work? Exploring GPU Architecture

Been studying GPU architectures recently and man, this video is absolute gold: youtube.com/watch?v=h9Z4...

The channel in general has stunning animations and explainers on various topics.