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CryptoNetLab

The purpose of CryptoNetLab is to develop and apply new cryptographic tools to secure computation and communication systems. Much of our past and current work includes designing, proving, and improving the building blocks enabling Filecoin, a decentralized storage network.

Though the group was founded to drive the creation of Filecoin, it seeks to facilitate the development and incorporation of cryptographic tools to increase security and privacy of communication, and engender new capabilities across the Web 3.0 stack.

How We Work

CryptoNetLab aims to function as a Public Good Cryptography Lab providing technological empowerment to the creators and users of Web 3.0 technologies. We prefer to work collaboratively following a distributed and permissionless research model: our goal is to become a pass-through layer to cryptography research.

To that end, we are very interested in forming collaborations with researchers and engineers working in our fields of interest, and we offer several grants and research fellowships to support these working relationships.

Research Endeavours

CryptoNetlab’s current foci are:

  • Cryptographic primitives: Filecoin and other Web 3.0 technologies rely on the performance and security of cryptographic primitives. Our endeavours include Proof of Replication (PoRep), Proof of SpaceTime (PoST), SEALSTACK, SNARKs, and VDFs.
  • Blockchain infrastructure: We are working to advance the state of the art of generic blockchain constructions.
  • Web 3.0 protocol improvements: Our research contributes improvements to the transaction layer of the Filecoin protocol and its components, including mining, repair, security, and storage. These improvements may be generalized to other Web 3.0 technologies.

Much of CryptoNetLab’s past work is exhibited in the Filecoin Research website and GitHub repo. You can follow our current research activities on our team Notion page.

Team

Related talks

View all talks
2021-09-21
A survey of rational proofs
Protocol Labs Research Talks / 2021.09.21
Rosario Gennaro
CryptoNetLab
Cryptography
2020-07-01
Vector commitment techniques and applications to verifiable decentralized storage
Theory and Practice of Blockchains 2020 / 2020.07.01
Matteo Campanelli , Dario Fiore, Nicola Greco , Luca Nizzardo , Dimitris Kolonelos
CryptoNetLab
Cryptography
2020-03-04
Drand: Distributed, bias resistant, unpredictable and publicly verifiable randomness
Protocol Labs Research Talks / 2020.03.04
Nicolas Gailly
CryptoNetLab
Distributed systems
2019-02-02
Expected consensus
ConsensusDay 1 / 2019.02.02 / Stanford, CA, USA
Henri Stern
CryptoNetLab , CryptoComputeLab
Distributed systems
2018-10-23
PoReps: Proof of space on real data
Lab Day 2018 / 2018.10.23 / San Francisco, CA, USA
Ben Fisch
CryptoNetLab , CryptoComputeLab
Cryptography , Distributed systems
2018-06-28
Good SNARKs are here needed
Zcon0 / 2018.06.28 / Montréal, Canada
Nicola Greco
CryptoNetLab
Cryptography
2018-02-03
VDFs and Filecoin
VDF Day / 2018.02.03 / Stanford, CA, USA
Jeromy Johnson
CryptoNetLab
Cryptography , Distributed systems

Related publications

View all publications
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.
Matteo Campanelli , Rosario Gennaro , Kelsey Melissaris, Luca Nizzardo
CryptoNetLab
Cryptography , Distributed systems
2021-09-27 / Report
MyOPE: Malicious security for oblivious polynomial evaluation
Oblivious Polynomial Evaluation (OPE) schemes are interactive protocols between a sender with a private polynomial and a receiver with a private evaluation point where the receiver learns the evaluation of the polynomial in their point and no additional information.
Malika Izabachène, Anca Nitulescu , Paola de Perthuis, David Pointcheval
CryptoNetLab
Cryptography
2021-09-21 / Report
Count me in! Extendability for threshold ring signatures
Ring signatures enable a signer to sign a message on behalf of a group anonymously, without revealing her identity. Similarly, threshold ring signatures allow several signers to sign the same message on behalf of a group; while the combined signature reveals that some threshold t of the group members signed the message, it does not leak anything else about the signers’ identities.
Diego Aranha, Mathias Hall-Anderson, Anca Nitulescu , Elena Pagnin, Sophia Yakoubov
CryptoNetLab
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 (to appear) / 2022.05.02 / St George's, Grenada
Nicolas Gailly , Mary Maller, Anca Nitulescu
CryptoNetLab
Cryptography
2021-03-18 / Report
Rinocchio: SNARKs for ring arithmetic
Succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (SNARKs) enable non-interactive efficient verification of NP computations and admit short proofs. However, all current SNARK constructions assume that the statements to be proven can be efficiently represented as either Boolean or arithmetic circuits over finite fields.
Chaya Ganesh, Anca Nitulescu , Eduardo Soria-Vazquez
CryptoNetLab
Cryptography
2020-12-05 / Report
Incrementally aggregatable vector commitment techniques and applications to verifiable decentralized storage
Vector commitments with subvector openings (SVC) [Lai-Malavolta, Boneh-Bunz-Fisch; CRYPTO’19] allow one to open a committed vector at a set of positions with an opening of size independent of both the vector’s length and the number of opened positions.
Advances in Cryptology – ASIACRYPT 2020 / 2020.12.05
Matteo Campanelli , Dario Fiore, Nicola Greco , Dimitris Kolonelos, Luca Nizzardo
CryptoNetLab
Cryptography , Distributed systems
2020-11-17 / Conference paper
Subversion-resilient enhanced privacy ID
Anonymous attestation for secure hardware platforms leverages tailored group signature schemes and assumes the hardware to be trusted. Yet, there is an increasing concern on the trustworthiness of hardware components and embedded systems.
Cryptographers’ Track at the RSA Conference / 2022.02.07 / San Francisco, CA, USA
Antonio Faonio, Dario Fiore, Luca Nizzardo , Claudio Soriente
CryptoNetLab
Cryptography
2020-04-08 / Conference paper
MonZa: Fast maliciously secure two party computation on Z_{2^k}
In this paper we present a new 2-party protocol for secure computation over rings of the form Z2k. As many recent efficient MPC protocols supporting dishonest majority, our protocol consists of a heavier (input-independent) pre-processing phase and a very efficient online stage.
IACR International Conference on Practice and Theory of Public-Key Cryptography (PKC) / 2020.05.04 / Edinburgh, Scotland
Dario Catalano , Mario Di Raimondo, Dario Fiore, Irene Giacomelli
CryptoNetLab
Cryptography
2020-01-15 / Conference paper
Single secret leader election
In a Single Secret Leader Election (SSLE), a group of participants aim to randomly choose exactly one leader from the group with the restriction that the identity of the leader will be known to the chosen leader and nobody else.
ACM Advances in Financial Technologies 2020 / 2020.10.21
Dan Boneh, Saba Eskandarian, Lucjan Hanzlik, Nicola Greco
CryptoNetLab
Cryptography
2019-11-20 / Report
Exploring connections between active learning and model extraction
Machine learning is being increasingly used by individuals, research institutions, and corporations. This has resulted in the surge of Machine Learning-as-a-Service (MLaaS) - cloud services that provide (a) tools and resources to learn the model, and (b) a user-friendly query interface to access the model.
Varun Chandrasekaran, Kamalika Chaudhuri, Irene Giacomelli , Somesh Jha, Songbai Yan
CryptoNetLab
2019-10-02 / Conference paper
Efficient UC commitment extension with homomorphism for free (and applications)
Homomorphic universally composable (UC) commitments allow for the sender to reveal the result of additions and multiplications of values contained in commitments without revealing the values themselves while assuring the receiver of the correctness of such computation on committed values.
Advances in Cryptology – ASIACRYPT 2019 / 2019.10.02
Ignacio Cascudo, Ivan Damgård, Bernardo David, Nico Döttling, Rafael Dowsley, Irene Giacomelli
CryptoNetLab
Cryptography
2019-08-24 / Conference paper
PLONK: Permutations over Lagrange-bases for oecumenical noninteractive arguments of knowledge
zk-SNARK constructions that utilize an updatable universal structured reference string remove one of the main obstacles in deploying zk-SNARKs[GKM + ]. The important work of Maller et al. [MBKM19] presented Sonic-the first potentially practical zk-SNARK with fully succinct verification for general arithmetic circuits with such an SRS.
Stanford Blockchain Conference / 2020.02.19 / Stanford, CA, USA
Ariel Gabizon , Zachary J Williamson, Oana Ciobotaru
CryptoNetLab , CryptoComputeLab
Cryptography
2019-05-29 / Report
AuroraLight: Improved prover efficiency and SRS size in a Sonic-like system
Using ideas from the recent Aurora zk-STARK of Ben-Sasson et al. [BCR + 19], we present a zk-SNARK with a universal and updatable SRS similar to the recent construction of Maller et al.
Ariel Gabizon
CryptoNetLab , CryptoComputeLab
Cryptography
2018-10-15 / Report
Scaling proof-of-replication for Filecoin mining
A proof-of-replication (PoRep) is a proof system that a server can use to demonstrate to a network in a publicly verifiable way that it is dedicating unique resources to storing one or more replicas of a data file.
Ben Fisch , Joseph Bonneau , Nicola Greco , Juan Benet
CryptoNetLab
Cryptography , Distributed systems
2018-07-14 / Report
PoReps: Proofs of space on useful data
A proof-of-replication (PoRep) is an interactive proof system in which a prover defends a publicly verifiable claim that it is dedicating unique resources to storing one or more retrievable replicas of a data file.
Ben Fisch
CryptoNetLab , CryptoComputeLab
Cryptography , Distributed systems
2017-07-27 / Report
Power fault tolerance
Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) accounts for faults as the number of faulty nodes and is thus cumbersome to apply to many modern decentralized systems. We introduce the Power Fault Tolerance (PFT) model, which reframes BFT in terms of participants' influence over the outcome of a protocol, instead of the number of nodes.
Protocol Labs
CryptoNetLab , CryptoComputeLab
Cryptography , Distributed systems
2017-07-27 / Report
Proof of replication
We introduce Proof-of-Replication (PoRep), a new kind of Proof-of-Storage, that can be used to prove that some data D has been replicated to its own uniquely dedicated physical storage. Enforcing unique physical copies enables a verifier to check that a prover is not deduplicating multiple copies of D into the same storage space.
Juan Benet , David Dalrymple , Nicola Greco
CryptoNetLab
Cryptography , Distributed systems
2017-07-19 / Report
Filecoin: A decentralized storage network
The internet is in the middle of a revolution: centralized proprietary services are being replaced with decentralized open ones; trusted parties replaced with verifiable computation; brittle location addresses replaced with resilient content addresses; inefficient monolithic services replaced with peer-to-peer algo-rithmic markets.
Protocol Labs
CryptoNetLab , CryptoComputeLab
Cryptography , Distributed systems
2014-07-15 / Report
Filecoin: A cryptocurrency operated file storage network
Filecoin is a distributed electronic currency similar to Bitcoin. Unlike Bitcoin’s computation-only proof-of-work, Filecoin’s proof-of-work function includes a proof-of-retrievability component, which requires nodes to prove they store a particular file. The Filecoin network forms an entirely distributed file storage system, whose nodes are incentivized to store as much of the entire network’s data as they can.
Protocol Labs
CryptoNetLab , CryptoComputeLab
Cryptography , Distributed systems

Related posts

View all posts
2022-04-08 / News, Team
Matteo Campanelli joins CryptoNetLab as a Research Scientist
CryptoNetLab is pleased to welcome Matteo Campanelli to the team as a research scientist. Matteo previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University (with Claudio Orlandi) and at the IMDEA Software Institute (with Dario Fiore).
Karola Kirsanow
CryptoNetLab
2022-03-07 / News, Team
Dario Catalano to advise CryptoNetLab
CryptoNetLab is excited to announce that Dario Catalano will be supporting the team as a research advisor. Dario is a professor at University of Catania, where he investigates questions related to reducing the gap between theory and practice in cryptography, with a particular focus on developing advanced yet efficient encryption mechanisms and designing secure distributed digital signature schemes.
Karola Kirsanow
CryptoNetLab
2021-12-21 / Blog
Protocol Labs research funding recipients 2021, part 2
Last week we introduced you to the researchers pursuing key problems in cryptography via RFP-009, RFP-010, and a Nucleation Grant. Now we are excited to share the recipients of research awards intended to fund proposals from PhD candidates, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty through our open grant offerings.
Jonathan Gross
AbstractionLab , CryptoNetLab , ResNetLab
Cryptography , Distributed systems , Metaresearch , Networking
2021-12-17 / Blog
Protocol Labs research funding recipients 2021, part 1
This has been a prodigious year for generating new funded collaborations between Protocol Labs Research and top academic researchers around the world! We have given out a whopping eighteen awards since August (with others pending).
Jonathan Gross
CryptoNetLab , CryptoComputeLab
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
CryptoNetLab
Cryptography
2021-10-22 / Blog
CryptoComputeLab announces proofs release version 10.0.0.0
CryptoComputeLab is very proud to release Proofs v10.0.0! A lot has changed under the hood in this release, but ultimately, it comes down to additional GPU support options and better performance during proving.
nemo, Volker Mische
CryptoComputeLab , CryptoNetLab
Cryptography
2021-07-29 / Blog
The Winding Journey to Proofs v8.0.0 and beyond

The proofs team is proud to announce the recent proofs releases v8.0.0, v8.0.1, and v8.0.2! These releases are Hyperdrive-enabled, which means that they contain the proof aggregation API that uses SnarkPack – in fact, the major difference between proofs v7.0.x and v8.0.x is the aggregation functionality!

nemo, Volker Mische
CryptoComputeLab , CryptoNetLab
Cryptography
2021-05-13 / Careers
We're hiring!
Protocol Labs Research has been growing rapidly, with the launch of CryptoComputeLab, CryptoEconLab, and CryptoNetLab, a number of new projects, and new researchers, advisors, and support staff joining the team.
Jorge M. Soares
CryptoComputeLab , CryptoEconLab , CryptoNetLab , ResNetLab
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
CryptoNetLab
Cryptography
2020-12-02 / News, Team
Anca Nitulescu joins Protocol Labs Research
Anca Nitulescu is joining CryptoLab (Update: now CryptoNetLab) as a Research Scientist. After obtaining their PhD in cryptography at ENS Paris, they worked as a Postdoctoral Scholar at Aarhus University and as Chief Cryptographer at Cosmian before coming to Protocol Labs.
Jorge M. Soares
CryptoNetLab
2020-11-23 / Blog
A research perspective on Filecoin, part two
In Part One, we traced the intellectual and technological history of modern implementations of distributed ledger technology. Now let’s take a stroll through the technological landscape around the time of Filecoin’s release:
David Dalrymple , Irene Giacomelli , Karola Kirsanow
CryptoNetLab , CryptoComputeLab
Cryptoeconomics , Cryptography , Distributed systems
2020-11-16 / Blog
A research perspective on Filecoin
The Filecoin network is launching in the middle of a revolution in internet architecture, where vulnerable centralized services dependent on trusted parties are being replaced with resilient decentralized solutions based on verifiable computation, and internet services are being relocated from inefficient central monoliths to the far reaches of the network by peer-to-peer markets.
David Dalrymple , Irene Giacomelli , Karola Kirsanow
CryptoNetLab , CryptoComputeLab
Cryptoeconomics , Cryptography , Distributed systems
2020-05-22 / News
Rosario Gennaro named 2020 IACR Fellow
In May, Rosario Gennaro was named a 2020 Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). IACR established its Fellows Program in 2002 to recognize oustanding members for significant technical and professional contributions to cryptology and related fields.
Jonathan Gross
CryptoNetLab , CryptoComputeLab
Cryptography
2020-02-18 / News, Team
Sarah Azouvi joins Protocol Labs Research
Sarah joins us from the Information Security Group at University College London, where she did research on consensus and worked towards her forthcoming PhD in Computer Science. During her studies, she collaborated with Protocol Labs and was also an intern at Calibra.
Jorge M. Soares
CryptoNetLab
Distributed systems , Cryptography
2020-01-27 / News, Team
Luca Nizzardo’s thesis wins UPM Extraordinary Award
Source: IMDEA Software Institute. Posted here with permission. Luca Nizzardo was a PhD student of the IMDEA Software Institute and his thesis “Cryptographic Techniques for the Security of Cloud and Blockchain Systems” defended in 2018 was directed by Associate Professor Dario Fiore.
Jorge M. Soares
CryptoNetLab
Distributed systems , Cryptography