Svetlana Ivanova's REU 2022 Web Page

About Me

Name: Svetlana Ivanova
Email: ivanova.svetlana.sochi (at) gmail.com
Institution: Charles University
Mentor: Marshall Ball
Project: GKR: journey to NIZK

About My Project

Weekly Summary

Week 1

This was the first week of the REU program, and so I attended the orientation meeting, where we learned more about DIMACS and the specifics of the program. I also met with my supervisor prof. Ball and started to work on Non-Malleable codes for polysize tampering with Guillermo Gamboa. We studied the defenitions and created introductory presentation.

Week 2

I decided to switch to another project supervised by prof. Ball and started to wotk with Ilia Zavidnyi on GKR: journey to NIZK. Ilia filled me in, sent me some introductional papers and I spent the week reading the first of these papers. Then, after getting basic understanding of a subject, we figuered out how the GKR protocol works (in details) and prepared a presentation on it.

Week 3

Me and Ilia presented GKR protocol to prof. Ball at NYU. It gave us the detailed understanding of the protocol and of our goal. For creating GKR protocol non-interactive, prof. Ball suggested us to learn more about lossy correlation-intractable hash functions [paper on lossy CI-hash functions]. Me and Ilia we decided to split the task: I started to read the paper above, and Ilia began with paper about making GKR zero-knowledge (the goal of our project is to create GKR protocol NIZK). The idea was to somehow combine the result of these researches, but we ran into a problem, that the assumptions used in the GKR zero-knowledge paper were not usable for us.

Week 4

On Monday we came to NYU to meet prof. Ball and discuss with him our thoughts. During discussion Ilia came up with the idea that maybe we could use existing paper which makes protocol non-interactive, use their construction, and then instead of sending a transcript to a verifier in clear, prover will send a commitment to a transcript, which will not reveal any information. Prof. Ball told us that this indeed should work and it will accomplish a goal of our project. Prof. Ball suggested we would write down this construction and proof its soundness and zero-knowledge(ness). We started working on that.

Week 5

We were struggling with writing down the idea. We still missed some details and some things remained unclear, so we met with prof. Ball. He helped us to deeply understand the construction and we started to work on a first sketch of out result.

Week 6

Ilia had to go to Utah, so I was working on my part of the sketch.

Week 7

This week we visited Bell Labs. The sketch was finished, so we were mainly preparing for the final presentations.

Week 8

It's the last week of the REU for us. On Thursday we presented our research and also listened to the talks of other students from the REU. Friday was the second day of the final presentations. It was exiting and I'm amazed of the amout of work that everyone did. REU 2022 was a great opportunity for me to get some understanding of how working on the research looks like and I'm grateful for that experience.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to:

References & Links

Presentations

Here is the REU website: