Scaling Privacy and Integrity Across the Internet

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Abstract: Modern technologies enable enhanced integrity and privacy guarantees not just for data, but also for computation. This is perhaps most emphatically demonstrated by the steady rise of zero-knowledge proofs, which are short certificates that attest to the correctness of computations (e.g., an age verification check) without revealing any secret inputs (e.g., the birth date on a digital ID). This subtly powerful technology enables anonymous credentials, privacy-preserving machine learning, anonymous blockchains, and much more--making the question of efficient zero-knowledge proofs fundamental to modern secure systems. Echoing Moore's law for computing, zero-knowledge proofs have improved on this front by ten orders of magnitude in the last two decades. In this talk, I will discuss our work on overcoming a key bottleneck that has emerged in this development: memory efficiency.

Speaker: Abhiram Kothapalli is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, hosted by Sanjam Garg. He is a recent graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science, advised by Bryan Parno. Previously, he was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned his B.S. in Computer Science and B.S. in Mathematics. Kothapalli's research develops cryptographic techniques aimed at scaling expressive privacy and integrity guarantees across the internet.

Location: NCS 120

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