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The future of ZK is in RISC-V zkVMs, but the industry must be careful: how Succinct's SP1's departure from standards causes bugs

The future of ZK is in RISC-V zkVMs, but the industry must be careful: how Succinct's SP1's departure from standards causes bugs

Why you should avoid having complex codebases and departing from standards when developing zero-knowledge virtual machines TL;DR: We found a subtle bug in Succinct's SP1 virtual machine, which allows a malicious user to prove the validity of false statements by subtly manipulating register 0 in the guest

Introducing DeMo: Decoupled Momentum Optimization for efficient distributed LLM training

Introducing DeMo: Decoupled Momentum Optimization for efficient distributed LLM training

TL;DR Training Large Language Models (LLM) with billions of parameters is computationally intensive and involves large communication in specialized data centers. Nous Research released DeMo, showing how to reduce these communication costs by orders of magnitude, decreasing costs and enabling training with poorer connections and less expensive hardware. This

Continuous Read-Only Memory Constraints: An implementation using Lambdaworks

Continuous Read-Only Memory Constraints: An implementation using Lambdaworks

Introduction When we first explored the world of STARKs, one of the most confusing concepts we encountered was constraints. We kept asking ourselves: How is it possible to summarize highly complex relationships between trace values using just a few polynomials? It wasn’t until we started implementing some examples that

lambdaworks - recap and updated roadmap

lambdaworks - recap and updated roadmap

Introduction It has been over a year and a half since we launched lambdaworks, our cryptography library for zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. We built it focusing on performance, ease of use, support for hardware acceleration, and teaching others how to develop and understand ZK. Several advances in ZK in the last

How we implemented the BN254 Ate pairing in lambdaworks

How we implemented the BN254 Ate pairing in lambdaworks

Introduction The elliptic curve BN254 is currently the only curve with precompiled contracts on Ethereum, making it the most practical choice of a pairing-friendly curve suitable for on-chain zk-SNARK verification with proof systems such as Groth16 and PlonK. This work arises from the need to have our own implementation of

ZK letters from ZKsync

How we created a research fast VM for ZKsync

For the past few weeks we have been working on a reimplementation of ZKsync's (out of circuit) EraVM. The goal is to improve on its current performance and explore the possibility of adding parallel execution through BlockSTM. For that, we first had to make a deep dive into

Rust Latam image

Giving Back: The Rust Foundation

We recently contributed $100,000 to the Rust Foundation and would like to share the reasoning behind our decision and the process that led us to this commitment. A slice of Lambda's history is that it started as a group of engineers with experience working on scalable and

Pinocchio: verifiable computation revisited

Pinocchio: verifiable computation revisited

1. Introduction 1.1 Motivation Imagine you want to do a complex computation, that you cannot carry out in your computer, or you need to get the results from a computer that you don't trust. How can you be sure it was done correctly without redoing it yourself

An introduction to circle STARKs

An introduction to circle STARKs

Introduction Scalable, transparent arguments of knowledge (STARKs) have gained widespread attention due to their applications in verifiable computing and blockchain scalability. We can use STARKs to generate a short string that attests to the integrity of a computation and a verifier can verify it very fast. The steps to generate

MLIR Dragon on top of an Ethereum machine

EVM performance boosts with MLIR

We implemented 75% of the functionality of the Ethereum Virtual Machine, in two weeks, with five new hires, compiling the VM opcode logic to native machine code with a state of the art compiler backend. Why did we do this? How? The TL;DR is: to get a performance boost

Aligned Layer: First Aligned Testnet in EigenLayer

Aligned Layer: First Aligned Testnet in EigenLayer

Introduction Zero-knowledge and validity proofs have gained attention due to their capabilities in decentralized private computation, scaling blockchains, identity protocols, and verifiable machine learning, among others. They allow one party, the prover, to show to other parties, the verifiers, that a given statement is true in a time- and memory-efficient

Our highly subjective view on the history of Zero-Knowledge Proofs

zero knowledge proofs

Our highly subjective view on the history of Zero-Knowledge Proofs

Zero-knowledge, Succinct, Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs) are powerful cryptographic primitives that allow one party, the prover, to convince another party, the verifier, that a given statement is true without revealing anything else other than the validity of the statement. They have gained widespread attention due to their applications in

Deep dive into Cairo's AIR and the changes we had to do in Lambdaworks to be compatible with Starknet Stone Prover

Deep dive into Cairo's AIR and the changes we had to do in Lambdaworks to be compatible with Starknet Stone Prover

Introduction During the last months, we have been working to make Lambdaworks STARK Platinum prover with Starknet's Stone prover. We also want STARK Platinum to be flexible enough to be used as a drop-in replacement for other STARK provers, such as Winterfell (employed as the default prover in

Sparkling Water Bootcamp on Cryptography in a nutshell

Sparkling Water Bootcamp on Cryptography in a nutshell

Introduction 16 weeks ago, we started the Sparkling Water Bootcamp to teach cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs to a group of engineers and students from around the world, focusing on applications and coding. We started with a team of 21 people, with backgrounds in Computer Science, Physics, Mathematics, Engineering, and Architecture,

Lambdaworks as a drop-in replacement for Winterfell to prove the Miden-VM

Lambdaworks as a drop-in replacement for Winterfell to prove the Miden-VM

Introduction Lambdaworks is our library for finite fields, elliptic curves, and proof systems. Among them, we have a STARK, Plonk, Groth 16 provers and we are on the way to having a fully compatible Cairo prover using STARKs. We want to continue adding new proof systems and polynomial commitment schemes

How Binius is helping move the ZK industry forward

How Binius is helping move the ZK industry forward

Introduction Zero-knowledge and validity proofs, often abbreviated as ZK, represent a fascinating field within the realms of cryptography, mathematics, and computer science. They allow one party, the prover, to convince other parties, termed verifiers, that a specific statement (such as the execution of a computer program) is true in a

If you don't know, look it up or how to create lookup tables for zero knowledge proofs

If you don't know, look it up or how to create lookup tables for zero knowledge proofs

Introduction ZK-SNARKs (zero-knowledge succinct, non-interactive arguments of knowledge) and STARKs (scalable transparent arguments of knowledge) are powerful cryptographic constructions with applications in decentralized private computing and blockchain scaling. They allow one party, the prover, to show that he carried a computation correctly to a second party, the verifier, in a

An overview of the Groth16 proof system

zero knowledge proofs

An overview of the Groth16 proof system

Introduction Over the last decade, SNARKs (succinct, non-interactive arguments of knowledge) and STARKs (scalable, transparent arguments of knowledge) have been gaining attention due to their applications in verifiable private computation and scalability of blockchains. Groth introduced this proof system in 2016 and saw an early application in ZCash. The protocol

Don't trust, verify or why you should care about benchmarks

Don't trust, verify or why you should care about benchmarks

Recently, there has been quite a lot of debate between researchers and engineers on the best proof system. For example, Justin Thaler and Srinath Setty have been discussing whether FRI or KZG based SNARKs are better in computational terms, following some calculations by Eli Ben-Sasson during SBC. Before jumping into

Inner Product Argument (IPA) and a Polynomial Commitment Scheme

Inner Product Argument (IPA) and a Polynomial Commitment Scheme

In this blogpost, we'll take a closer look at the Inner Product Argument. We'll start by understanding the basics of this technique and then shift our focus to its variant within the Halo2 proving system. Specifically, we'll explore how Halo2 ingeniously employs the Inner

Lambda Crypto Doctrine

Lambda Crypto Doctrine

We believe crypto has been incredibly successful at providing a trustless financial layer for the 21st century. In particular it has found product market fit in two main areas: * In developing countries providing aids and tools to individuals that need to fight against inflation, censorship and for companies and individuals

How to code FRI from scratch

How to code FRI from scratch

Introduction STARKs (scalable transparent arguments of knowledge) have gained a lot of attention in recent years due to their capacity to help scale Ethereum and other L1s. They provide a way to guarantee the integrity of a computation carried out by an untrusted party via cryptographic proof. This proof can

All you wanted to know about Plonk

All you wanted to know about Plonk

Introduction Zero-knowledge proofs, also known as ZKPs, are becoming popular due to their numerous applications in delegating computations to untrusted servers and addressing scalability issues in decentralized ledgers. By using ZKPs, we can prove the validity of a given computation without revealing sensitive information, and the proof is short and

How to get a true headache: brute forcing NTRU

How to get a true headache: brute forcing NTRU

Introduction Lattice cryptography is a type of cryptographic scheme that relies on the hardness of certain computational problems related to lattices, which are geometric structures formed by repeating a pattern of points in space. Lattice-based cryptography is considered a promising candidate for post-quantum cryptography, as it is believed to be

I want to break free from Lattice-based cryptography, but not even a quantum computer can help me

I want to break free from Lattice-based cryptography, but not even a quantum computer can help me

Introduction Public key encryption is a secure way of sending information over the internet. It uses two keys: a public key and a private key. We use the public key to encrypt messages. We can share this key publicly. The private key is kept secret and only known to the