Matteo Campanelli | Protocol Labs Research

Matteo Campanelli

Research Scientist/ Cryptonet

Education

PhD in Computer Science, 2018
City University of New York

MSc in Technical Artificial Intelligence, 2014
Utrecht University

BSc in Computer Science, 2010
University of Catania

Matteo is interested in the science and applications of succinct cryptographic proofs (how can I convince you that I know a potentially huge—and potentially secret—piece of data with a very very tiny proof).

He joined Protocol Labs in 2022. In a previous life, he had the privilege of being a post-doctoral researcher at Aarhus University (with Claudio Orlandi) and at the IMDEA Software Institute (with Dario Fiore). In 2018 his advisor, Rosario Gennaro, and the City University of New York made the careless blunder of giving him a PhD.

Matteo has a totally seriously-named website.

Areas of Expertise

Cryptographic Proofs (SNARKs, zero-knowledge), Authenticated Data Structures, Rational and Fine-grained Cryptography

Talks

Vector commitment techniques and applications to verifiable decentralized storage

Date: 2020-07-01
Event: Theory and Practice of Blockchains 2020
Speakers:
Matteo Campanelli, Dario Fiore, Nicola Greco, Luca Nizzardo, Dimitris Kolonelos
Group: Cryptonet
Area: Cryptography

Publications

Structure-preserving compilers from new notions of obfuscations

Date: 2022-11-01/Report
Link
Description: The dream of software obfuscation is to take programs, as they are, and then compile them into obfuscated versions that hide their secret inner workings. In this work we investigate notions of obfuscations weaker than virtual black-box (VBB) but which still allow obfuscating cryptographic primitives preserving their original functionalities as much as possible.

Authors:
Matteo Campanelli, Danilo Francati, Claudio Orlandi
Group: Cryptonet
Area: Cryptography

Impossibilities in succinct arguments: Black-box extraction and more

Date: 2022-09-09/Report
Link
Description: The celebrated result by Gentry and Wichs established a theoretical barrier for succinct non-interactive arguments (SNARGs), showing that for (expressive enough) hard-on-average languages we must assume non-falsifiable assumptions. We further investigate those barriers by showing new negative and positive results related to extractability and to the preprocessing model.

Authors:
Matteo Campanelli, Chaya Ganesh, Hamidreza Khoshakhlagh, Janno Siim
Group: Cryptonet
Area: Cryptography

Curve trees: Practical and transparent zero-knowledge accumulators

Date: 2022-09-08/Report
Link
Description: In this work we propose a new accumulator construction and efficient ways to prove knowledge of some element in a set without leaking anything about the element. This problem arises in several applications including privacy-preserving distributed ledgers.

Authors:
Matteo Campanelli, Mathias Hall-Andersen
Group: Cryptonet
Area: Cryptography

Encryption to the future: A paradigm for sending secret messages to future (anonymous) committees

Date: 2022-08-30/Conference paper
Link
Description: A number of recent works have constructed cryptographic protocols with flavors of adaptive security by having a randomly-chosen anonymous committee run at each round. Since most of these protocols are stateful, transferring secret states from past committees to future, but still unknown, committees is a crucial challenge.

Event: Asiacrypt 2022
Location: Taipei, Taiwan
Authors:
Matteo Campanelli, Bernardo David, Hamidreza Khoshakhlagh, Anders Konring, Jesper Buus Nielsen
Group: Cryptonet
Area: Cryptography

Linear-map vector commitments and their practical applications

Date: 2022-07-06/Report
Link
Description: 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.

Authors:
Matteo Campanelli, Anca Nitulescu, Carla Ràfols, Alexandros Zacharakis, Arantxa Zapico
Group: Cryptonet
Area: Cryptography

Witness-authenticated key exchange revisited: Improved models, simpler constructions, extensions to groups

Date: 2022-04-08/Report
Link
Description: 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.

Authors:
Matteo Campanelli, Rosario Gennaro, Kelsey Melissaris, Luca Nizzardo
Group: Cryptonet
Area: Cryptography, Distributed systems

Incrementally aggregatable vector commitment techniques and applications to verifiable decentralized storage

Date: 2020-12-05/Report
Link
Description: Vector commitments with subvector openings (SVC) 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.

Event: Advances in Cryptology – ASIACRYPT 2020
Authors:
Matteo Campanelli, Dario Fiore, Nicola Greco, Dimitris Kolonelos, Luca Nizzardo
Group: Cryptonet
Area: Cryptography, Distributed systems