The chapter delves into the development of efficient threshold signature schemes, particularly focusing on the context of the Zcash ecosystem. It explores the evolution of threshold signatures, the significance of Schnorr signatures, and the creation of a two-round secure threshold Schnorr signature scheme named Frost. The conversation discusses the impact of patents on cryptography, the optimization of network rounds for efficiency, and the implementation of threshold signature schemes in applications like Zcash wallets.
In this week’s episode, Anna and Nico chat with Chelsea Komlo, Chief Scientist for the Zcash Foundation and member of the Cryptography, Security, and Privacy lab at the University of Waterloo.
They discuss what sparked Chelsea’s interest in cryptography research, starting with her work contributing to Tor, to her move to Zcash and her PhD work on Threshold Signature Schemes. They define some important terms around different signature schemes and discuss possible optimizations that can be used to make these more performant. They then dive into her work on the FROST Threshold Signature Scheme plus some new upcoming work.
Here’s some additional links for this episode:
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Aleo is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup.
Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/
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