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Nicolas Gailly

Research Scientist / Cryptonet

Education

BS/MSc in Computer Science, 2015

École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Nicolas does research and development on applied cryptography, and decentralized systems.

Areas of Expertise

Cryptography, Distributed Systems

Talks

2020-03-04
Drand: Distributed, bias resistant, unpredictable and publicly verifiable randomness
Protocol Labs Research Talks / 2020.03.04
Nicolas Gailly
Cryptonet
Distributed systems

Publications

2023-02-13 / Report
tlock: Practical timelock encryption from threshold BLS
We present a practical construction and implementation of timelock encryption, in which a ciphertext is guaranteed to be decryptable only after some specified time has passed. We employ an existing threshold network, the League of Entropy, implementing threshold BLS [BLS01, B03] in the context of Boneh and Franklin’s identity-based encryption (IBE).
Nicolas Gailly , Kelsey Melissaris, Yolan Romailler
Cryptonet
Cryptography
2021-05-13 / Conference paper
SnarkPack: Practical SNARK aggregation
Zero-knowledge SNARKs (zk-SNARKs) are non-interactive proof systems with short and efficiently verifiable proofs. zk-SNARKs are widely used in decentralised systems to address privacy and scalability concerns. One of the main applications is the blockchain, were SNARKs are used to prove computations with private inputs and reduce on-chain footprint verification and transaction sizes.
Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2022 / 2022.05.02 / St George's, Grenada
Nicolas Gailly , Mary Maller, Anca Nitulescu
Cryptonet
Cryptography

Blog posts

2022-06-06 / Blog
A deep dive into DKG, chain of SNARKs, and arkworks
In this blog post I am going to share the main takeaways I have learned while implementing a proof of concept (PoC) of a Distributed Key Generation (DKG) inside of a SNARK.
Nicolas Gailly
Cryptonet
Cryptography
2021-11-22 / Blog
Increasing software update security through PGP-compatible threshold signatures
Increasing software update security through PGP-compatible threshold signatures Whether we are aware of them or not, software updates and the systems that support them permeate the current software landscape. Given their pervasiveness, it should come as a surprise that software created to manage such updates, broadly referred to as package managers, still pose security concerns.
Lukas Zapolskas, Nicolas Gailly
Cryptonet
Cryptography
2021-05-10 / Blog
SnarkPack: How to aggregate SNARKs efficiently
A guided dive into the cryptographic techniques of SnarkPack This post exposes the inner workings of SnarkPack, a practical scheme to aggregate Groth16 proofs, a derivation of the Inner Pairing Product work of Bünz et al.
Nicolas Gailly
Cryptonet
Cryptography
2021-03-16 / Talks
Protocol Labs at FOSDEM 2021
FOSDEM is one of the biggest events for software developers building open-source software. Founded in 2000, the conference takes place once a year in Brussels, gathering over 8000 developers, hackers, and engineers from across the spectrum of software development.
Alfonso de la Rocha , Nicolas Gailly , Molly Mackinlay, Yiannis Psaras
ResNetLab
Distributed systems