iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

sasha @sasha.place · 17/09/2026

how getting the "This is an automated message that your submission xxxx/xxxx to the Cryptology ePrint Archive has been accepted." email feels.

static.klipy.com

Vince McMahon Throwing Money at WWE Event

ALT: Vince McMahon Throwing Money at WWE Event

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sasha @sasha.place · 17/09/2026

if you switch to encrypting proposals, like in Solana's MCP protocol, there are now only 16-32 encrypted ciphertexts, which is much more reasonable in terms of parameters.

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sasha @sasha.place · 17/09/2026

another cool change of perspective: The prior intended use case of Batch Threshold Encryption for mempool privacy has been encrypting individual transactions (like a few hundred at a time). BTE schemes are not at all practical at these parameters.

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sasha @sasha.place · 17/09/2026

The improvements: 1. Most of the prior schemes don't support weights. Having per-party weights is desirable in a PoS blockchains. 2. The prior state of the art batch threshold encryption schemes don't support specialized DKG protocols. The two schemes in this paper do!

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sasha @sasha.place · 11/09/2026

going up for tenure in the UK they ask you what your haitch-index is

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sasha @sasha.place · 08/09/2026

another major AI tell I have noticed recently: AI loves writing sentences with semicolons in proofs. I almost never see these in human written papers

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Reposted by sasha

ePrint Updates @eprint.ing.bot · 03/09/2026

Private and Verifiable Outsourcing of Open-Weight LLM Inference (Kanav Gupta, Jonathan Katz, Ian Miers) ia.cr/2026/1849

Abstract. Open-weight models allow clients to run LLMs locally, thus keeping their data private from untrusted providers. However, running large models requires massive hardware and storage resources (especially challenging on resource-constrained devices like smartphones), limiting local execution to smaller models. This leaves clients with a frustrating compromise: settle for a less-capable model that can be run locally, or sacrifice privacy by sending queries to an external server.

We present an efficient protocol that allows a client to privately and verifiably outsource LLM inference of an open-weight model to a pair of malicious (but non-colluding) servers. Privacy implies that neither server learns anything about the client’s queries. At the same time, the client can verify the claimed result using information posted by the model owner along with the model weights.

Compared to prior state-of-the-art for private LLM inference (SIGMA, PETS’ 24) – which does not provide verifiability – our protocol is $11 − −14$ faster while imposing no overhead at the servers (beyond the cost of inference in the original model). Our protocol also scales to larger models not supported by prior work: for example, with our protocol a client can run the Llama 2-70B model using just 179~MB of local storage (instead of the 140~GB required to run the model locally).

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sasha @sasha.place · 03/09/2026

love the sentence in the Eurocrypt Call for Papers saying they're not gonna give out best paper awards if all the papers are bad.

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sasha @sasha.place · 21/08/2026

One interesting way this manifests itself in AI-written papers, is that these AI agents often review their own work to improve it. These papers will often add many random sentences about subgroup inclusion checks for elliptic curves, canonical encodings, etc. in a crypto context in response

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sasha @sasha.place · 21/08/2026

I've been using AI reviews to improve my papers and it is remarkably nitpicky sometimes. AI is really good at asking for a bunch of random low level implementation considerations or a bunch of extra experiments to run.

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sasha @sasha.place · 19/08/2026

how does IEEE have so many really bad journals/conferences? what leads to this?

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sasha @sasha.place · 18/08/2026

kind of tilted at work today

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sasha @sasha.place · 17/08/2026

i met nicholas carlini and saw adam sandler in the last 3 days :D

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sasha @sasha.place · 14/08/2026

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")

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Reposted by sasha

ePrint Updates @eprint.ing.bot · 06/08/2026

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

Abstract. Video provenance is an important problem on the modern internet. In response, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) has developed a standard for verifying video and image provenance where cameras sign captured videos with an on-device secret key. Since videos are generally edited and resized before be- ing posted, the C2PA signature from a camera cannot be used as is to verify provenance of published videos. Prior work has developed zero-knowledge techniques for verifying provenance of edited im- ages and videos. In this work, we develop new efficient techniques for producing such zero-knowledge proofs. First, we show how to represent common video edits as matrix multiplications in a form that is particularly friendly for zero-knowledge provers and enables a number of optimizations. Second, we develop a SNARK-friendly video representation, which we call sfvr, that reduces prover work for video editing. Third, we design new efficient methods for incor- porating signed data into a SNARK proof. To evaluate our designs, we built an end-to-end system for proving edits to a signed video. In our end-to-end system, we optimize the NeutronNova folding scheme for high-arity folding. To scale the size of our Neutron- Nova proofs, we implement a “Read-Write Streaming” version of NeutronNova to take advantage of high-performance storage and parallel computing resources. Our system achieves competitive performance and scale relative to prior work.

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sasha @sasha.place · 06/08/2026

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

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sasha @sasha.place · 05/08/2026

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.

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sasha @sasha.place · 05/08/2026

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

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sasha @sasha.place · 30/07/2026

(trying to finish a paper thoughts)

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sasha @sasha.place · 30/07/2026

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

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sasha @sasha.place · 29/07/2026

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"

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sasha @sasha.place · 21/07/2026

2) The AI will leave in sentences that are responding to parts of the prompt that the user gave, even if they don't make sense in the flow of the paper.

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sasha @sasha.place · 21/07/2026

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.

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sasha @sasha.place · 15/07/2026

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.

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sasha @sasha.place · 09/07/2026

more crypto papers should start with sentences that read like Star Wars scrolling text

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sasha @sasha.place · 20/06/2026

coding theory is my passion

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sasha @sasha.place · 27/05/2026

who is this for! i do not want to share a research area with somebody who needs some PhD student to spend multiple hours on a pointless definitions exercise to think that a paper is acceptable. (I think the paper that this excerpt is from is pretty good otherwise, to be clear)

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sasha @sasha.place · 27/05/2026

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".

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sasha @sasha.place · 21/05/2026

relatedly i have seen this happen a few times in youtube comments: somebody asks a scientific question, then somebody writes a well-written answer that is almost certainly human written, and somebody comments "okay thanks ChatGPT". feels very anti intellectual and i hope this trend doesn't grow.

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sasha @sasha.place · 21/05/2026

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.

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sasha @sasha.place · 11/05/2026

i actually put in a lot of effort into prompting in the "deep rust project" case to make Claude terminate quickly and have it not read every file in the project every time, while this is clearly not as important for simpler python stuff.

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sasha @sasha.place · 11/05/2026

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.

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sasha @sasha.place · 29/04/2026

it brings me great pleasure to announce that i found a codebase that copies this typo from this paper

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sasha @sasha.place · 24/04/2026

(some of the papers were submitted multiple times, it's not 7 separate papers)

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sasha @sasha.place · 24/04/2026

they call me 007: - 0 published conference papers - 0 published journal papers - 7 rejected submissions (these are my real current numbers in grad school)

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sasha @sasha.place · 23/04/2026

fun stuff from digging around on eprint.iacr.org : Jens Groth updated a paper from 2009 this week.

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sasha @sasha.place · 13/04/2026

it's also a fairly forced acronym in the crypto case 😁

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sasha @sasha.place · 13/04/2026

This has felt like an impenetrable super hard-to-understand paper since the start of grad school, and it feels good to more or less understand Lasso/Twist and Shout. Minor warning that TaSSLE uses weird notation in a few places.

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sasha @sasha.place · 13/04/2026

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.

eprint.iacr.org

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...

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sasha @sasha.place · 09/04/2026

"keyses"??? did gollum name the variables in this paper?

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sasha @sasha.place · 09/04/2026

I do think this weird ethics appendix does raise some good points about how the current ethics guidelines for security conferences just aren't that well suited to crypto papers

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sasha @sasha.place · 09/04/2026

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....

sasha.place

About the example ethics appendices in the USENIX Call for Papers

TL;DRThe USENIX Security ‘26 Call for Papers has some examples of papers with well-written ethics appendices, which are now required to submit to the confere...

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sasha @sasha.place · 02/04/2026

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

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