The Evolution of Ciphers and Marvelous Hash Construction

In this week’s episode, we catchup with Alan Szepieniec, a researchers at Nervos and co-author of the Supersonics paper & the Marvellous family of Hash Functions (which specify the Vision/Rescue cyphers). We chat about his past work in cryptography, how the Supersonics paper came to be, and dive into the new generation of hash functions emerging, including the Marvelous universe.

For more info, please have a look at these resources and past episodes!

• Design of Symmetric-Key Primitives for Advanced Cryptographic Protocols (the Marvellous (Vision/Rescue) paper)
• Transparent SNARKs from DARK Compilers (Supersonic paper)
• On a Generalization of Substitution-Permutation Networks: The HADES Design Strategy - Competing designs for arithmetization-friendly hash functions
• Starkad and Poseidon: New Hash Functions for Zero Knowledge Proof Systems
• MiMC https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/492.pdf and attack https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/951.pdf
• Jarvis and Friday, the first members of the Marvellous universe (may they rest in peace) https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1098.pdf
• ... and the Groebner basis attack that killed them: https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/419.pdf

And here are some of the previous ZKP episodes that we mention:

• Ben Fisch Episode
• Benedikt Bunz Episode
• Joseph Bonneau Episode
• Eli Ben-Sasson Episode

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