The Cryptomat

This is my perpetual effort aimed at summarizing various concepts in cryptography.

Start with some basic things:

• Pairings, or: “Versatile elliptic curves that power most modern crypto!”
• KZG polynomial commitments, or: “How to get succinctness if modern SNARKs?”
• RSA accumulators, or: “Who needs Merkle trees anyway?”

Then, learn about popular digital signature schemes:

• Threshold BLS, faster than most people know how to do it.
• ECDSA, or: “What most cryptocurrencies use for signing TXNs”
• Schnorr, and why you should prefer it over ECDSA.

Or, some esoteric ones:

• BBS+ signatures, or: “Did you know you can sign Pedersen commitments?”

You can learn about ZK range proofs:

• DeKART, or: “How to prove many range fast!”
• BFGW, or: “How to prove one range succinctly!”

Lastly, you can read some of my favorite things:

• Groth16, or: “Fastest-to-verify, most-succinct zkSNARK scheme”
• Authenticated Multipoint evaluation Trees (AMT)s, or “Homomorphic Merkle trees from KZG”
• SMURFs, or: “Did you know know unique silent-setup signatures are possible?”
• Feist-Khovratovich (FK), or: “Why you may not need AMTs after all.”
• Spartan, or: “How to sumcheck R1CS?”