more crypto papers should start with sentences that read like Star Wars scrolling text

coding theory is my passion

random cryptography pet peeve: not everything needs syntax and definitions! multiple papers in the "image/video editing with zk-SNARKs" literature make cryptographic definitions for what it means to edit a video. the proof is then basically "it reduces to the security of the underlying SNARK".

AI assistants are still a pretty recent phenomenon and it will take some time for rules around etiquette to develop. however, if i ask you a question and your response is to type it into an AI chatbot and send me the response, I think that is disrespectful.

i've been adding claude code into my workflow a lot recently, it is super interesting how much faster it is for writing simple Python code than for writing stuff kind of deep into a Rust project.

it brings me great pleasure to announce that i found a codebase that copies this typo from this paper

they call me 007: - 0 published conference papers - 0 published journal papers - 7 rejected submissions (these are my real current numbers in grad school)

fun stuff from digging around on eprint.iacr.org : Jens Groth updated a paper from 2009 this week.

I recently spent some time reading "Unlocking the lookup singularity with Lasso" (eprint.iacr.org/2023/1216) and the sequel papers. I think TaSSLE (eprint.iacr.org/2024/1075) is the best companion/exposition work for understanding Lasso of the ones out there.

"keyses"??? did gollum name the variables in this paper?

new blog post! The USENIX Security '26 Call for Papers has examples of the required Ethics Appendix which they think are well written. If you read the example ethics appendix for cryptography, it is actually somewhat strange: www.sasha.place/blog/2026/04....

i just got a cold email offering 70$ an hour for a "tutor" role where I would mentor a high school student on a research project to submit to high school science fairs. crazy stuff

more complaining about paper reviews: I have now twice gotten the paper review comment "can you do a tight, concrete security reduction?" for protocols using zk-SNARKs as a subcomponent. No paper in the applied SNARK literature does this! it's messy!

performative zk-SNARKs 🙄 wearing tote bags and stuff

New preprint is up! We put it up so we can submit to poster sessions, I will write more about it when it gets accepted.

credit where credit is due: this AI generated code is the only research-grade cryptography code I have ever seen that tried to properly do domain separation.

typod zero-knowledge as "aero-knowledge". we're going aero knowledge baby 😎

adventures in vibe coding cryptography: I was asked to review some AI generated cryptography code. It implemented a multiset hash function which computed the hash of a multiset by hashing each element individually with Poseidon, and then adding them together as field elements.

a unique winter sight in College Park: a common sledding location is the hill next to the IONQ office :)

I have to work on a project for grad school which uses the RISC-Zero zkVM. Reiterating a hot take I have had previously: zkVMs are not actually that developer friendly as soon as you need to try to optimize your code in any way!

There was a small proof I was stuck on, so I asked a few different AI assistants to help me prove it. They were all wrong, but ChatGPT did give a correct outline of a proof, where it was correct after working out the details.

i got rejection #4 of grad school today! I got a new insane reviewer highlight: Our paper says "this protocol can be made noninteractive via the Fiat-Shamir transform" in a few places, and the reviewer comments "if you don't pass everything into the F-S hash function, this would be insecure".

applied cryptography take: when a lot of cryptography papers need a publicly verifiable, append-only database, they almost always write "blockchain," when I think they should be writing "blockchain/transparency log". there are rarely economic incentives that would make a public blockchain make sense

i have spent a really frustrating amount of time in grad school re reading stuff I wrote and asking "how could a reviewer misread this and use this as an excuse to reject the paper without reading the rest of it"

I have used this simple technique to find issues in 3 of the 4 papers I have reviewed in grad school so far: When reading a proof/protocol, just ask yourself "is every quantity that needs to be polynomially bounded for this to work actually poly bounded?"

i finished my last class of grad school! i am done with classes for life! (hopefully)

"Some random background character from Les Misérables" x.com/dailyportalz...

Japan's "Mundane Halloween" costume contest is back! Each year website DailyPortalZ holds a contest where people dress up as something super duper ordinary. Here's a thread of some of my favorites from the 2025 contest! #MundaneHalloween

our paper does client-side SNARK proving, and this AI generated response asked why we didn't use the cq lookup argument for a lookup table with 2^32 elements. cq involves storing an elliptic curve point per element of your lookup table! (2 if you count the KZG setup).

the response to my rebuttal at USENIX security is AI generated (marked certainly AI generated by 2 detectors and makes some weird technical mistakes in its writing) and is a rejection. really frustrating.

I learned from this 3b1b video that "poles" of functions are called that because they look like poles in a tent. I read a large amount of the LogUp literature thinking they were called poles because of some analogy with a globe that I didn't understand. www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0wJ...

who came up with this MPC model? Dr. Doofenschmirtz?

Cryptographic Personas: Responsible Pseudonyms Without De-Anonymization (Rachel Thomas, Oliwia Kempinski, Hari Kailad, Emma Margaret Shroyer, Ian Miers, Gabriel Kaptchuk) ia.cr/2025/1969

I met somebody who appears in the Enron dataset a few times tonight! She was a fairly high ranking energy attorney who was working with their lobbyists a lot around 2000. it was a really fun obscure celebrity encounter.

New preprint! It's still in submission, I will write a thread/blogpost about it when it gets accepted.

here's a problem i have been thinking about for a bit, which i was reminded of by an online argument today. wanted to rant a little. there is currently a pretty big demand for consultants to work on quantum computing and post-quantum crypto in industry.

I want to make a thread, that I will maybe convert into a blog post, of cryptography things that I have found really hard to google.

🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱 Polish benchmark 🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱 RAAAAA 🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱

this week is my 1 year anniversary of starting grad school. I have been reading 1-2 papers (or equivalent amount of a textbook) per week most of the time. here is the list of papers i have read since starting. I am pretty proud of it! here is a list of papers that were highlights:

writing "i.e.g." to hedge my bets against using the wrong acronym

i now realize that this reviewer (who bid for an applied crypto paper) does not seem to know what a commitment scheme or PRF is, in addition to probably asking us to cite their paper

working through updating my paper based on the reviews, and one of the reviewers almost certainly asked me to cite their (superficially looks related but isn't) paper

ticketmaster is officially headquartered in West Virginia? kind of interesting

got my first conference rejections (2 for S&P).

one of my hobbies is reading crank papers on eprint.iacr.org. Most AI-generated papers seem to exist to try to fool other people, but a scary number of them seem to involve somebody being convinced they have made a major discovery by an LLM

i wish i was over 6 feet tall so i could use the "long fellow" crypto library :( github.com/google/longf...

the billing code for shoulder pain is 25.519! cryptography is everywhere!

im working on my first 2 subreview papers ever! both are pretty good papers! it is giving me optimism about the state of the field

I wrote a blog post about some (hopefully non-obvious) thoughts about the differences between big tech and academia: www.sasha.place/blog/2025/06...

I really liked this blog post explaining this internet math meme from a few years ago vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025...