Luca Nizzardo | Protocol Labs Research

Luca Nizzardo

Research Scientist/ Cryptonet

Education

PhD in Software, Systems, and Computing, 2018
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

MS in Mathematics, 2013
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca

BS in Mathematics, 2011
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca

Luca is a Cryptography Researcher at Protocol Labs, where he works on crypto-related problems involving Filecoin. Before joining Protocol Labs, Luca did his PhD in Cryptography at Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies in Software under the outstanding supervision of Dario Fiore. He is broadly interested in Blockchain related problems involving cryptography, like Zero Knowledge Proof Systems, Contingent Payments, Consensus Algorithms, and Vector Commitment Schemes.

He has been working on cryptographic techniques for the security of the Cloud since 2014, with a particular focus on homomorphic primitives. Before starting his PhD, he was a business intern at IBM Italy in the Global Business Services division (Fall 2013) and a visiting master student at City College of New York under the supervision of Rosario Gennaro (Spring 2013). During the Spring 2017, he was a visiting PhD student under the supervision of Rosario Gennaro at City College of New York.

Areas of Expertise

Cryptography

Talks

2020-07-01
Vector commitment techniques and applications to verifiable decentralized storage
Theory and Practice of Blockchains 2020 / 2020.07.01

Matteo Campanelli, Dario Fiore, Nicola Greco, Luca Nizzardo, Dimitris Kolonelos

Cryptonet

Cryptography

Publications

2023-08-30/Report
Filecoin Proof of Useful Space
This document provides a simple formal definition of Proof of Space (taken from the academic literature) and an informal definition of persistent and useful space (needed for Filecoin). It describes construction details and a security proof for the Stacked-DRGs proof of space (SDR), and goes into how SDR is used in Filecoin.

Irene Giacomelli, Luca Nizzardo

Cryptonet

Cryptography

2022-04-08/Report
Witness-authenticated key exchange revisited: Improved models, simpler constructions, extensions to groups
We revisit the notion of Witness Authenticated Key Exchange (WAKE) where a party can be authenticated through a generic witness to an NP statement. We point out shortcomings of previous definitions, protocols and security proofs in Ngo et al.

Matteo Campanelli, Rosario Gennaro, Kelsey Melissaris, Luca Nizzardo

Cryptonet

Cryptography, Distributed systems

2020-12-05/Report
Incrementally aggregatable vector commitment techniques and applications to verifiable decentralized storage
Vector commitments with subvector openings (SVC) [Lai-Malavolta, Boneh-Bunz-Fisch; CRYPTO’19] allow one to open a committed vector at a set of positions with an opening of size independent of both the vector’s length and the number of opened positions.

Advances in Cryptology – ASIACRYPT 2020 / 2020.12.05

Matteo Campanelli, Dario Fiore, Nicola Greco, Dimitris Kolonelos, Luca Nizzardo

Cryptonet

Cryptography, Distributed systems

2020-11-17/Conference paper
Subversion-resilient enhanced privacy ID
Anonymous attestation for secure hardware platforms leverages tailored group signature schemes and assumes the hardware to be trusted. Yet, there is an increasing concern on the trustworthiness of hardware components and embedded systems.

Cryptographers’ Track at the RSA Conference / 2022.02.07 / San Francisco, CA, USA

Antonio Faonio, Dario Fiore, Luca Nizzardo, Claudio Soriente

Cryptonet

Cryptography