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

Introduction We discussed previously how to ensure message confidentiality between two parties, Alice and Bob. We saw that we could use a symmetric key cipher, such as AES or ChaCha20, to encrypt messages between Alice and Bob so that only they can read them. However, when Bob gets a message

Introduction Encryption has been the main application of cryptography for a very long time. Its goal is to transform a message into another one and send it through an insecure channel, such that only the intended parties (who know all the elements necessary to reverse the transformation) can read it