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Rosario Gennaro

Research Scientist / CryptoLab

Education

PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1996

MIT

MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1993

MIT

Laurea in Matematica, 1989

Universita' di Catania

Rosario Gennaro received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996, and was a researcher at the IBM T.J.Watson Research Center before joining City College in the Summer of 2012. Rosario’s research focuses on cryptography and network security and more in general on theoretical computer science. His most recent works address the security of the cloud computing infrastructure, the issues of privacy and anonymity in electronic communication, and proactive security to minimize the effects of system break-ins.

Areas of Expertise

Cryptography, Network Security

Talks

2021-09-21
A survey of rational proofs
Protocol Labs Research Talks / 2021.09.21

Publications

2023-03-16 / Report
LURK: Lambda, the ultimate recursive knowledge
We introduce Lurk, a new LISP-based programming language for zk-SNARKs. Traditional approaches to programming over zero-knowledge proofs require compiling the desired computation into a flat circuit, imposing serious constraints on the size and complexity of computations that can be achieved in practice.
Nada Amin, John Burnham, François Garillot, Rosario Gennaro , Chhi'mèd Künzang , Daniel Rogozin, Cameron Wong
2022-06-02 / Report
On the impossibility of algebraic vector commitments in pairing-free groups
Vector Commitments allow one to (concisely) commit to a vector of messages so that one can later (concisely) open the commitment at selected locations. In the state of the art of vector commitments, algebraic constructions have emerged as a particularly useful class, as they enable advanced properties, such as stateless updates, subvector openings and aggregation, that are for example unknown in Merkle-tree-based schemes.
Dario Catalano , Dario Fiore, Rosario Gennaro , Emmanuele Giunta
2022-04-08 / Report
Witness-authenticated key exchange revisited: Improved models, simpler constructions, extensions to groups
We revisit the notion of Witness Authenticated Key Exchange (WAKE) where a party can be authenticated through a generic witness to an NP statement. We point out shortcomings of previous definitions, protocols and security proofs in Ngo et al.

Blog posts

2023-04-06 / News
Cryptonet launches new open source SNARK system
Testudo is a new open source SNARK system developed by Cryptonet that offers efficient proofs with smaller setups. It uses polynomial commitments and sumchecks to prove the satisfiability of an R1CS system, and applies several optimizations to reduce the trusted setup size, improve proving times, and achieve fast verification and small proof size.
2022-08-11 / News, Grants
Introducing Cryptonet network grants
Originally founded to drive the creation of Filecoin, Cryptonet set out to create a community of researchers and engineers working on designing, proving, improving the building blocks for crypto-networks to engender new capabilities across the Web 3.
2022-07-05 / Blog
On algebraic vector commitments

In this post, we discuss a recent result from Cryptonet about the impossibility of succinct vector commitments in groups of known prime order.