Cryptonet | Protocol Labs Research
Cryptonet
Cryptonet is an open distributed research lab working on applied cryptography to improve crypto-networks.
The purpose of Cryptonet is to develop and apply new cryptographic tools to secure computation and communication systems. Much of our past and current work includes designing, proving, and improving the building blocks enabling Filecoin, a decentralized storage network.
Though the group was founded to drive the creation of Filecoin, it seeks to facilitate the development and incorporation of cryptographic tools to increase security and privacy of communication, and engender new capabilities across the Web 3.0 stack.
To learn more about Cryptonet, visit the group’s website.
Publications
View all PL Research 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
2023-02-13/Report
tlock: Practical timelock encryption from threshold BLS
We present a practical construction and implementation of timelock encryption, in which a ciphertext is guaranteed to be decryptable only after some specified time has passed. We employ an existing threshold network, the League of Entropy, implementing threshold BLS [BLS01, B03] in the context of Boneh and Franklin’s identity-based encryption (IBE).
Nicolas Gailly, Kelsey Melissaris, Yolan Romailler
2022-11-01/Report
Structure-preserving compilers from new notions of obfuscations
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.
Matteo Campanelli, Danilo Francati, Claudio Orlandi
2022-09-09/Report
Impossibilities in succinct arguments: Black-box extraction and more
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.
Matteo Campanelli, Chaya Ganesh, Hamidreza Khoshakhlagh, Janno Siim
2022-09-08/Report
Curve trees: Practical and transparent zero-knowledge accumulators
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.
Matteo Campanelli, Mathias Hall-Andersen
2022-08-30/Conference paper
Encryption to the future: A paradigm for sending secret messages to future (anonymous) committees
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.
Asiacrypt 2022 / 2022.12.05 / Taipei, Taiwan
Matteo Campanelli, Bernardo David, Hamidreza Khoshakhlagh, Anders Konring, Jesper Buus Nielsen
Blog
2023-04-06/News
Cryptonet launches new open source SNARK system
Testudo is a new open source SNARK system developed by Cryptonet that offers efficient proofs with smaller setups. It uses polynomial commitments and sumchecks to prove the satisfiability of an R1CS system, and applies several optimizations to reduce the trusted setup size, improve proving times, and achieve fast verification and small proof size.
2022-08-26/Blog
Protocol Labs research funding recipients 2022
Protocol Labs Research is thrilled to announce the first research funding recipients of 2022! We fund researchers around the world and have given out 11 awards so far this year. These awards include three RFPs, two Summer Research Grants, five Doctoral fellowships, and one Postdoctoral fellowship.
ConsensusLab, CryptoComputeLab, CryptoEconLab, Cryptonet, Network Research, ProbeLab, Research Acceleration
2022-08-11/News
Introducing Cryptonet network grants
Originally founded to drive the creation of Filecoin, Cryptonet set out to create a community of researchers and engineers working on designing, proving, improving the building blocks for crypto-networks to engender new capabilities across the Web 3.