Anca Nitulescu | Protocol Labs Research

Anca Nitulescu

Research Scientist/ Cryptonet

Education

• PhD in Cryptography, 2019
  École normale supérieure
• Parisian Master of Research in Computer Science, 2014
  Université Paris Diderot (Paris VII)
• Master's in Mathematics, 2013
  University of Bucharest
• Bachelor's in Mathematics, 2011
  University of Bucharest

Anca is a cryptographer working on research problems related to Filecoin.

Anca holds a PhD in Cryptography from École Normale Supérieure Paris (ENS) under the supervision of David Pointcheval and Dario Fiore (IMDEA, Madrid). Their PhD subject revolved around SNARKs, a tool to prove integrity for results of Delegated Computation. They were a visiting assistant researcher at Columbia University, USA working with Rosario Gennaro and Mariana Raykova on Verifiable Computation topics. They also completed a postdoc at Aarhus University on topics related to authentication primitives and theoretical aspects of SNARKs.

Their main research interests are cryptographic proving systems, especially zero-knowledge proofs and succinct arguments of knowledge (SNARKs).

Areas of Expertise

• Verifiable Computation
• Proving systems (SNARKs, zero-knowledge proofs)
• Authentication primitives

Talks

2021-01-26

Verifiable computation on encrypted data
Protocol Labs Research Talks / 2021.01.26

Publications

• Caulk: Lookup arguments in sublinear time
  We present position-hiding linkability for vector commitment schemes: one can prove in zero knowledge that one or m values that comprise commitment cm all belong to the vector of size N committed to in C.

• Linear-map vector commitments and their practical applications
  Vector commitments (VC) are a cryptographic primitive that allow one to commit to a vector and then “open” some of its positions efficiently. Vector commitments are increasingly recognized as a central tool to scale highly decentralized networks of large size and whose content is dynamic.

• What makes Fiat–Shamir zkSNARKs (updatable SRS) simulation extractable?
  We show that three popular universal zero-knowledge SNARKs (Plonk, Sonic, and Marlin) are updatable SRS simulation extractable NIZKs and signatures of knowledge (SoK) out-of-the-box avoiding any compilation overhead.

• MyOPE: Malicious security for oblivious polynomial evaluation
  Oblivious Polynomial Evaluation (OPE) schemes are interactive protocols between a sender with a private polynomial and a receiver with a private evaluation point where the receiver learns the evaluation of the polynomial in their point and no additional information.

• Count me in! Extendability for threshold ring signatures
  Ring signatures enable a signer to sign a message on behalf of a group anonymously, without revealing her identity. Similarly, threshold ring signatures allow several signers to sign the same message on behalf of a group; while the combined signature reveals that some threshold t of the group members signed the message, it does not leak anything else about the signers’ identities.

• SnarkPack: Practical SNARK aggregation
  Zero-knowledge SNARKs (zk-SNARKs) are non-interactive proof systems with short and efficiently verifiable proofs. zk-SNARKs are widely used in decentralized systems to address privacy and scalability concerns. One of the main applications is the blockchain, where SNARKs are used to prove computations with private inputs and reduce on-chain footprint verification and transaction sizes.

• Rinocchio: SNARKs for ring arithmetic
  Succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (SNARKs) enable non-interactive efficient verification of NP computations and admit short proofs. However, all current SNARK constructions assume that the statements to be proven can be efficiently represented as either Boolean or arithmetic circuits over finite fields.