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Linear-map Vector Commitments and their Practical Applications

Series: Department Seminar

Speaker: Dr. Anca Nitulescu Research Scientist Protocol Labs.

Date/Time: Oct 20 17:00:00

Location: Microsoft Teams - ON-LINE

Abstract:
Vector commitments (VC) are a cryptographic primitive that allow one to commit to a vector and then �??open�?� some of its positions or a function of them efficiently. Vector commitments are increasingly recognized as a central tool to scale highly decentralized networks of large size and whose content is dynamic. In this work, we examine the demands on the properties that an ideal vector commitment should satisfy in the light of the emerging plethora of practical applications and propose new constructions that improve the state-of-the-art in several dimensions and offer new tradeoffs.

We also propose a unifying framework for functional openings that captures several constructions and shows how to generically achieve some properties from more basic ones. On the practical side, we focus on building schemes that over-perform in efficiency prior schemes and do not require new trusted setup (we can reuse existing ceremonies for pairing-based �??powers of tau�?� run by real-world systems such as ZCash or Filecoin).

Speaker Bio:
Anca Nitulescu is a Research Scientist at Protocol Labs. She graduated with a PhD from ENS Paris supervised by David Pointcheval and co-advised by Dario Fiore from IMDEA Software Madrid. Her research interests are Vector Commitments for Decentralised Storage, Zero-Knowledge Proofs and Succinct Arguments, Verifiable Computation for Encrypted Data and Homomorphic Authentication Primitives. Microsoft teams link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_OWJiODliN2EtNGUxNi00M2U5LWFlNmMtYTBmM2Y4YWZjMDE3%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%226f15cd97-f6a7-41e3-b2c5-ad4193976476%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%221beaa166-3a14-437e-9106-75a2e2caebeb%22%7d

Host Faculty: Dr. Chaya Ganesh