M{IT}² & 0xPARC | The Cryptographic Iceberg
In the past decade, we've transitioned from first-generation cryptography (encryption, signatures) to second-generation, or "programmable" cryptography–zero-knowledge, homomorphic encryption, multi-party computation, functional encryption, program obfuscation, oblivious RAM and more. These technologies allow us to embed and execute arbitrary programs inside of cryptographic protocols, and they’ve just begun to round the corner on practical feasibility in the past few years.
This event features three technical talks from experts at 0xPARC–the Program for Applied Research in Cryptography. Our speakers will take you on a tour of the “cryptographic iceberg”: from underlying cryptographic constructions, to the engineering challenges of building systems on them, to applications and implications. Dinner will be provided!
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Talk #1: Dark Forest: “Infinitely Hackable Battlecode” with zkSNARKs (Brian Gu)
Description: Dark Forest is a massively-multiplayer online strategy game built with zero-knowledge cryptography (zkSNARKs). It is a fully-decentralized RTS game, and is thus “infinitely hackable”: players can script complex bots and automations, implement unbreakable player alliances and corporations via smart contracts, bribe and deceive enemies, and even add new features to the game universe thanks to the fact that the underlying game mechanics are encoded into a programmable cryptographic protocol. Monthly rounds featured battle-royale style contests where anything and everything goes, with thousands of players (and bots, and AIs, and smart contracts!) competing head-to-head, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in game assets at stake. We’ll discuss technical challenges of building a fully decentralized strategy game with programmable cryptography.
Talk #2: Private Partial Evaluation over Untrusted Hosts (Justin Glibert)
Description: We describe a network architecture for distributed program execution over untrusted hosts. Recent advancements in multi-party computation, fully homomorphic encryption, and program obfuscation enable us to break up an arbitrary program into cryptographic “shards,” and execute these shards over multiple actors on a network. More concretely: I can run a program whose input is some private data that lives on your computer that I can’t see; I can even run a program with a thousand inputs, each of which lives on a different (untrusted) host on the network. In this talk, we’ll break down a multi-layer architecture and programming model for such a system: from cryptographic protocols, to networking, to programming language design, to sample applications.
Talk #3: How to Build a Computer Out of Polynomials (Brian Lawrence)
Description: Programmable Cryptography allows us to build new computing systems made of math (polynomials, matrices) rather than transistors. In this talk, we cover two elementary but surprisingly powerful building blocks of programmable cryptography protocols: polynomial commitment schemes and oblivious transfer. (This talk is based on content from our new introduction to programmable cryptography book, Four Easy Pieces, by Evan Chen.)