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How do you achieve peak performance while avoiding burnout? Big-wave surfing pioneer Laird Hamilton and former pro volleyball star Gabby Reece join a16z crypto General Partner Arianna Simpson to talk about what it takes.
with @LairdLife @GabbyRee
Anonymous digital credentials allow users to prove attributes like their age without revealing their identity. However, existing schemes have failed to achieve wide-scale deployment because they rely on new cryptographic assumptions and trusted parameter setups or require system-wide updates to both issuer infrastructure and the secure hardware on user devices.
In this talk, Abhi Shelat (Northeastern University) introduces the first anonymous credential scheme that is a “drop-in” solution for existing digital identity systems. He details how to overcome the primary bottleneck — generating ZK proofs for the widely deployed Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) over the P256 curve, standardized hashing schemes and legacy document formats — by designing a specialized ZK proof system based on sumcheck and Ligero. This approach requires no changes to issuer processes, no updates to mobile device hardware or operating systems, and no non-standard cryptographic assumptions. The result is a system fast enough for real-world use: a privacy-preserving identity presentation based on the ISO MDOC standard can be generated in less than 700 ms on a mobile device.
Joint work with Matteo Frigo and available at eprint.iacr.org/2024/2010.
About the presenter
Abhi is a professor at Northeastern University and an engineer at Google. He has been working on privacy-preserving protocols and cryptography.
About a16z crypto research
a16z crypto research is a multidisciplinary lab that works closely with our portfolio companies and others toward solving the important problems in the space, and toward advancing the science and technology of the next generation of the internet.
More about us: a16z.com/2022/04/21/announcing-a16z-crypto-research
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