This is a fairly complete record of my technical projects that are relevant to current lines of work.
2024
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(03/24 to 06/24) Signature Singularity Residency Organizer
- Alongside yush, organized a residency bringing teams taking useful signed data and wrapping it in ZK proofs for succinctness (on-chain use cases), ownership (raw signature never revealed to server), and selective disclosure (only revealing relevant info)
- Supported primarily by PSE
- Demo day here: https://demo.sigsing.com, and full list of projects here: https://lu.ma/k4t26qch
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(03/24 to 04/24) ZK Summit NFC app
- Tech showcase of cutting edge cryptography for all 500 attendees of ZKSummit11 in Athens
- Made NFC cards for all attendees and talks to verifiably prove meeting and attendance
- Allowed attendees to perform a private set intersection with each other to see common contacts/talks using a combination of 2PC+FHE
- Allowed users to use Nova folding proofs to get a succinct summary of their entire conference experience
- Allowed users to make ZKP proofs of deep engagement (meeting speakers, attending talks) to share on Twitter
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(01/24 to 03/24) Denver ZK Quests
- Launched an NFC activation for ETHDenver attendees by chipping all entrance badges
- Experience focused on loyalty/engagement — rewarding participants who could make ZKPs of deeper engagement with certain brands or events with better prizes
- ZKPs were wrapped as “quests” that attendees could finish
- Gave out 12,000 badges for 50,000 total taps and 3,000 quests finished
2023
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(08/23 to 01/24) Jubmoji
- Funded by PSE, project & design led by Rachel, technology led by me
- 2023 activation at Zu/Devconnect using NFC cards that produce unique Baby jubjub signatures upon tap
- Privately digitize In-person cryptography experiences into VIP data
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(06/23 to 08/23) Project Vinyl
- Independent exploration into continuations of NFC projects
- Ideas were converted into the Jubmoji grant proposal PSE grant proposal!
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(05/23 to 06/23) ZuStamps
- Funded by 0xPARC, led by me and collaborated with Rachel & Althea
- First deployment of signature-producing NFC chips for ZK applications
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(04/23 to 05/23) Zupoll
- Funded by 0xPARC, collaborated with Sampriti
- Developed a polling app built on Semaphore for Zuzalu citizens to use for polls
- Don’t think the privacy benefits outweigh the UX costs unfortunately
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(02/23 to 04/23) Zupass and PCD SDK
- Funded by 0xPARC, led by Brian and collaborated with Ivan & DC
- One of three full-time developers on the (cracked) Zupass team
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(02/23 to 04/23) WebAuthn Halo2 ZK wrapper
- Funded by 0xPARC/PSE, project led by Richard and proposed/supported by me
- Creating ZK circuits to prove knowledge of a valid WebAuthn signature
- Applied for use in an AA wallet by Know Nothing Labs
- Researched if WebAuthn keys could be a reasonable nullifier; the guarantees are not very strong unfortunately
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(01/23 to 03/23) Nozee, or ZK-Blind
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(11/22 to 02/23) heyauthn!
- Funded by Personae Labs, collaborated with Sehyun and Emma
- Demo using WebAuthn to power Semaphore identities
- Later upstreamed to main Semaphore repo by Richard!
- Used NFC CMAC chips to create Semaphore groups, first documented use of NFC for ZK
- Posted to a ZK IAP class Discord channel
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(01/23 to 02/23) MIT ZK IAP instructor and TA
- Funded by 0xPARC
- Lecturer for Session 4 and partial lecturer for Session 11
- TA for office hours and mentored a few end-of-course projects
2022
- (11/22 to 01/23) Right-field secp256k1 ECDSA research
- Funded by Personae Labs, collaborated with Dan Tehrani
- Iteration of work started with efficient-ecdsa
- Avoiding wrong-field arithmetic all together by using a zkSNARK that operates on finite fields that aren’t FFT friendly
- Focused on Halo2-IPA combined with ECFFT, unfortunately this was quite difficult and Dan’s work with Spartan ended up being successful
- (09/22 to 11/22) efficient-ecdsa
- Funded by Personae Labs, collaborated with Dan Tehrani
- Developed in an ETH research post
- (08/22 to 10/22) In-person heyanon
- Funded by 0xPARC and Personae Labs
- Used heyanon to build a demo of in-person anonymous speech at SBC ‘22
- Used Semaphore identities, given out as QR codes
- First ZK demo to involve multiple roles which I find
- (03/22 to 11/22) heyanon!
- Funded by 0xPARC and Personae Labs, collaborated with Lakshman Sankar
- Anon twitter posting with ETH reputation
- ECDSA proving was way too slow for this to be useful/fun, I was laser focused on improving that in later projects
2021
- (09/20 to 06/21) Adversarial learning & image model research
- Researcher in Madry Lab, initially investigating adversarial learning as an ML application of my cryptography/security interests
- Researched effect of “hidden augmentations” to learning models on ImageNet performance compared to actual architectural differences
- Researched sample complexity of OOD performance for SoTA ImageNet models, as a follow-up to “Do Adversarially Robust ImageNet Models Transfer Better?”
- Got sniped or had inconclusive results on all explorations 😅
2020
2020 was a year of creative self-exploration. Lifelong interests in music, fashion, and decor intensified this year as I figured out more about what made me Vivek. No significant technical projects, except for aforementioned image model research.
2019 and before
- (12/18 to 04/19) Cryptography Quant Research
- Job at a (now defunct, lol) crypto hedge fund called Virgil Capital
- Researched underlying cryptoeconomics of prominent DeFi platforms like MakerDAO and Compound to develop trading strategies
- (01/17 to 08/18) Authenticated data structures research with MIT PRIMES
- Member of Devadas Lab at MIT, advised by Alin Tomescu
- Researched and developed efficient append-only authenticated dictionaries, published in ACM CCS ‘19
- Applications to certificate authorities and public-key directories
- Clever combination of KZG polynomial commitments and binary tree structures
- (01/16 to 12/16) Consensus research with MIT PRIMES
- Member of Devadas Lab at MIT, advised by Albert Kwon and Ling Ren
- Investigated the viability of distributed consensus using a Proof of Space protocol that merged graph pebbling with merkle trees
- Alternative to expensive Proof of Work protocols used in products like Bitcoin
I found out about MIT PRIMES (and math, and CS, and MIT, and basically everything on this blog) through my older brother Surya, who was in the very first cohort back in 2011 and did abstract algebra research!
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