The Role of Oracles in DeFi and the Use of Cryptography and Merkle Trees in Starks

This week, we explore the Fractal transparent SNARK construction with its authors Dev Ojha and Nick Spooner - both students of Alessandro Chiesa at UC Berkeley. We explore how Fractal works, how it improves on some of the earlier work on Sonic and Marlin, how it borrows from but differentiates itself from STARKs, as well as what they discovered while working on this paper about recursive SNARKs and what makes that property possible.

Here is some of the material we touch on:

Fractal Paper

Ariel Gabizon's episode

Eli Ben-sasson's episode

Marlin Paper

Digging into recursive snarks

Latest recursive SNARKitecture with Izaak Meckler from O(1)Labs

Thank you to this week's sponsor Trail of Bits

Just recently, a critical vulnerability was found in the certificate validation functionality on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016/2019 This bug allows attackers to break the validation of trust in a wide variety of contexts, such as HTTPS and code signing - Trail of Bits has developed a PoC exploit and put up a website Whose Curve is it Anyway that let's users test whether or not they are vulnerable.

To learn more about this vulnerability and the Trail of Bits exploit, please check out this recent blog post entitled: Exploiting the Windows CryptoAPI Vulnerability. Also keep an eye on the ToB blog for security news and explanation pieces like this one.

Thanks again Trail of Bits

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