Ariel Gabizon

Ariel Gabizon is researcher at Protocol Labs. Previously a Computer Science postdoc at Technion and Cryptographer at Zcash. I'm working mostly on zk-SNARK technology at Protocol Labs; currently in the context of proof of replication: How do you succinctly prove to someone you have multiple copies of a certain file? Until recently worked on Zero-Knowledge proofs and other Blockchain related stuff at Zcash. My largest contributions at Zcash were helping to make MPCs for SNARK parameters simple enough to implement; and discovering and helping to mitigate an unlimited counterfeiting bug http://fortune.com/2019/02/05/zcash-vulnerability-cryptocurrency/. The amazing work of mathematicians like Riemann, Artin, Hasse and Weil perhaps unintentionally gave us Elliptic curve pairings - arguably the only practical - though partial - form of "cryptographic homomorphic encoding". And now with all the data and value flowing digitally in the world, these pairings give us non-trivial - i.e. not just all or nothing - tradeoffs between verifiability and privacy, access and security; manifesting in things like zk-SNARKs, BLS signatures, and polynomial commitment schemes..exploring what these tools can let us do in the new digital frontier is what interests me.