today's feeling

sasha@sasha.place · 4h ago

I'm at USENIX Security this week. A pretty large number of authors are having other people give their presentations because of visa issues. This morning I watched one of these substitute presenters give a presentation in the third person ("they did x", "they found this result")

I'm at USENIX Security this week. A pretty large number of authors are having other people give their presentations because of visa issues. This morning I watched one of these substitute presenters give a presentation in the third person ("they did x", "they found this result")

zk-Cinema: Proving Video Provenance in Zero Knowledge (Alexander Frolov, Jianfeng Guo, Xinyi Zhao, Trisha Datta, Dan Boneh, Ian Miers) ia.cr/2026/1598

New preprint! a bunch of improvements and cool techniques for better zero-knowledge proofs of image/video editing. Will write more about it soon. Read here: eprint.iacr.org/2026/1598

I ran a GPT 5.6 typo check on this paper (26 pages of dense 2 column text) and it took me like 90 minutes to fix all the typos/grammars/minor math things 😬 made me feel unbelievably dyslexic.

sasha@sasha.place · last wk.

waiting for the eprint.iacr.org admins to post my submission

waiting for the eprint.iacr.org admins to post my submission

current academic writing problem: I've reviewers jump down my throat a few times over what I thought were minor writing mistakes. Now, any time I'm writing something which will likely get scrutinized by reviewers, I get really bad writer's block because im thinking about every way they could be mean

one of these weird academic writing things that a lot of my coauthors do is use the word "crucially" way too much when writing the introductions to papers. i do not like the way this sounds. are there people out there who see the word "crucially" in academic writing and say "oh boy I like this now"

2 more AI tells in AI generated papers I've seen a lot recently: 1) When AI's use a mathematical concept named after somebody (e.g. Shamir Secret Sharing), they start referring to it by just the last name and nothing else, which leads to a lot of weird and hard to read writing.

sasha@sasha.place · 4w ago

two AI writing tells in AI generated research papers I have noticed recently which I think aren't sufficiently discussed: 1) Unnecessarily hyphenating words a lot. 2) Using the word caveat a lot.

two AI writing tells in AI generated research papers I have noticed recently which I think aren't sufficiently discussed: 1) Unnecessarily hyphenating words a lot. 2) Using the word caveat a lot.

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

sasha@sasha.place · last yr.

the opposite of the denominator is the nominator. didn't know i missed that part of fractions in elementary school

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.

Unlocking the lookup singularity with Lasso

This paper introduces Lasso, a new family of lookup arguments, which allow an untrusted prover to commit to a vector $a \in \mathbb{F}^m$ and prove that all entries of a reside in some predetermined t...

eprint.iacr.org

"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.

ePrint Updates@eprint.ing.bot · 5mo ago

Icefish: Practical zk-SNARKs for Verifiable Genomics (Alexander Frolov, Maurice Shih, Rob Patro, Ian Miers) ia.cr/2026/463

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.

sasha@sasha.place · 7mo ago

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.

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!