News

2025

  • Seminar August 19 (2025), 14:15-15:45 in room 1019 by Jens Groth
    • Title: Zero-knowledge proofs, zkVMs, and verifiable AI
    • Abstract: Verification has always been important, but the scale and rigor is growing with the increasing ability to fake data, humans, and history. Zero-knowledge proofs enable verifiable computation and other ways to verify the correctness of claims. This will be a non-technical big picture talk about the past, present and future of zero-knowledge proofs and their role in verifiability. We start with zero-knowledge proofs and their evolution. Next, we look at zkVMs that make it easy for developers to execute programs with provably correct outputs. Finally, we look into the future of verifiability and its interplay with AI.
    • Bio: Jens Groth is Chief Scientist at Nexus and was Professor of Cryptology at UCL and Director of Research at Dfinity. Groth has made seminal contributions to the study of zero-knowledge proofs, including the invention of pairing-based SNARKs and co-inventions of pairing-friendly proof systems, logarithmic size proofs in cyclic groups, prover-efficient proofs with constant overhead, and usage of lookups in proving correct machine execution. He received the UCLA Chancellors Award for Postdoctoral Research in 2007 and two International Association for Cryptologic Research Test-of-Time awards in 2021 and 2023, respectively.
  • August 12, 2025: Our paper " "Linearity of $\mathbb{Z}_{2^L}$-Linear Codes via Schur Product" (Gustavo Bastos, Maiara Bollauf, Agnaldo Ferrari, and Øyvind Ytrehus) was accepted to the Designs, Codes, and Cryptography. arXiv
  • August 12, 2025: From October 1, we will be joined by a new researcher (non-permanent), Roberto Parisella.
  • August 12, 2025: From September 1, we will be joined by a new PhD student, Pritam Pal.
  • June 26, 2025: We will have a summer intern (Darya Pisetskaya) from 01.07 till 31.08.
  • June 26, 2025: We will have a visitor Maja Lie from the Imperial College from 30.06 to 11.07. She will give a seminar on 02.07
  • June 11, 2025: Our paper "Revisiting Discrete Logarithm Reductions" (Maiara Bollauf, Roberto Parisella, Janno Siim) was accepted to IACR CiC. See the eprint version
  • June 7, 2025: We made an informal offer to a new PhD student candidate in ZK, who will join us this autumn. More information in a few weeks.
  • June 1, 2025: First working day of Urmas Luhaäär (future Ph.D. student)
  • May 22, 2025: We were visited by Luís T. A. N. Brandão who also gave a seminar
  • May 21, 2025: We made an informal offer to an excellent postdoc candidate in ZK, who will join us this autumn. More information in a few weeks.
  • May 12-16, 2025: We were visited by Roberto Parisella from Norway, who also gave a seminar
  • May 3, 2025: Our paper "On Gaussian Sampling for q-ary Lattices and Linear Codes with Lee Weight", (Maiara F. Bollauf, Maja Lie, Cong Ling) was accepted to Crypto 2025!
  • May 3, 2025: Our paper "On Knowledge-Soundness of Plonk in ROM from Falsifiable Assumptions" (Helger Lipmaa, Roberto Parisella, Janno Siim) was accepted to Crypto 2025!
  • Apr 25, 2025: From June 1, our group will be joined by a new Ph.D. student, Urmas Luhaäär
  • Apr 16, 2025: Congratulations Janno Siim for getting the prize for the best Estonian young computer scientist, for "developing and applying ZK proofs". The story in Estonian
  • March 24, 2025: Our two papers "Polymath: Groth16 Is Not The Limit" (youtube link) (Helger Lipmaa) and "On Knowledge-Soundness of Plonk in ROM from Falsifiable Assumptions" (youtube link) (Helger Lipmaa, Roberto Parisella, Janno Siim) were presented at the ZKProof 7 in Sofia
  • Mar 23, 2025: We have two open positions (postdoc and PhD student)
  • Mar 8, 2025: Our presentation "Special Soundness of Non-Interactive Polynomial Commitment Schemes" (based on recent papers of Helger Lipmaa, Roberto Parisella, Janno Siim) was accepted to the |PRoTeCS 2025 workshop (affiliated event of Eurocrypt 2025)
  • Feb 4, 2025: Our papers "Polymath: Groth16 Is Not The Limit" (Helger Lipmaa) and "On Knowledge-Soundness of Plonk in ROM from Falsifiable Assumptions" (Helger Lipmaa, Roberto Parisella, Janno Siim) were accepted to the ZKProof 7 in Sofia
  • Feb 1, 2025: We welcome Janno Siim and Maiara Bollauf to our team as new lecturers (= assistant professors)!
  • January 14, 2025: From February 1, our group will be joined by Janno Siim and Maiara Bollauf
  • January 13, 2025: As part of the TEMTA119 project, we are co-organizing institute-wise seminars on the Foundations of CS and AI. The first seminar is on January 21 and given by Miika Hannula
  • January 9, 2025: Our (extended) group will teach four courses the following semester. The second one is a new course:

2024

  • December 18, 2024: We got funding! Estonian Research Council grant PRG2531 "Modern Cryptographic Techniques", for topics ranging from modern ZK and SNARKs, post-quantum cryptography, code-based cryptography, and related topics in cryptography and coding theory.
  • December 16, 2024: Together with two other research groups, we started to co-organize "Mathy CS" seminars. (The first talk was on December 16)
  • December 11, 2024: We hired two new lecturers—more information in January.
  • November 20--24, 2024: Research visits by Janno Siim and Maiara Bollauf
  • November 1, 2024: We will start giving a new BSc level course, LTAT.04.020 Cryptography, starting from Fall 2025. Stay tuned. (Lecturer: Toomas Krips)
  • October 12, 2024: ZKSummit 12 is happening in Lisbon. Helger Lipmaa is invited to present his paper Polymath: Groth16 Is Not The Limit (Crypto 2024)
  • October 1, 2024: We have two open lecturership positions, one in cryptography and another one in coding theory and cryptography
  • September 26, 2024: Our group has a table booked for the inaugural "Institute of Computer Science Day". Toomas Krips and Sedat Akleylek are present with lollipop. Come and visit.
  • September 12, 2024: Helger Lipmaa presented his paper Polymath: Groth16 Is Not The Limit (Crypto 2024) in an online seminar organized by Nexus.
  • September 1, 2024: Erki Külaots started as a Ph.D. student
  • September 1, 2024: Helger Lipmaa (jointly with people from machine learning and formal verification) obtained a new grant on foundations of digital solutions and AI
  • September 1, 2024: New semester started. Sedat Akleylek is reading a new course on Public-Key Cryptography, Helger Lipmaa a new course on Zero-Knowledge Proofs, and Toomas Krips is organizing Research Seminar on Cryptography And Cyber Security
  • August 27, 2024: Shuto Kuriyama defended his MSc thesis "Onigoroshi: Polynomial Interactive Oracle Proofs for Circuit Satisfiability over Cyclotomic Rings with Automorphism Gates" (supervisors: Russell W.F. Lai and Helger Lipmaa)
  • August 25, 2024: Our paper "Actively Secure Polynomial Evaluation from Shared Polynomial Encodings" by Pascal Reisert, Toomas Krips, Sebastian Hasler, Marc Rivinius, and Ralf Küsters was accepted to Asiacrypt 2024!
  • August 22, 2024: Helger Lipmaa presented his paper Polymath: Groth16 Is Not The Limit at Crypto 2024. See for the video (to be uploaded soon).
  • August 13, 2024: Pille Pullonen-Raudvere defended her Ph.D. thesis Foundations of efficient and secure algorithm development for secure multiparty computation (supervisors: Sven Laur and Dan Bogdanov)
  • July 2, 2024: Our paper "Shuffle Arguments Based on Subset-Checking" (Behzad Abdolmaleki, Prastudy Mungkas Fauzi, Toomas Krips, Janno Siim) was accepted to the SCN 2024 Conference! (All Behzad, Prastudy, and Janno are also alumni of our group)
  • July 1, 2024: Erki Külaots was accepted as a new PhD student (supervisor: Helger Lipmaa)
  • June 23-27, 2024: Helger Lipmaa participated with an invited presentation at the CIBE 2024 workshop, where he presented our Eurocrypt 2024 paper.
  • June 12, 2024: Erki Külaots defended MSc thesis on "Two-Party Multi-Point Function Secret Sharing" (supervisor: Toomas Krips)
  • June 12, 2024: Helger Lipmaa gave an invited presentation (in Estonian) at the conference Küberinnovatsioon 2024, introducing zero-knowledge proofs to general audience.
  • May 3, 2024: Our paper "Polymath: Groth16 Is Not The Limit" (Helger Lipmaa) was accepted to the Crypto 2024 Conference!
  • Mar 25, 2024: Roberto Parisella gave an invited talk to Privacy and Scaling Explorations about our Eurocrypt 2024 paper. Youtube video: Constant-Size zk-SNARKs in ROM from Falsifiable Assumptions
  • March 1, 2024: Helger Lipmaa has been running internal ZK seminars at the CS department (but attended also by some people from outside)
  • February 2-4, 2024: We coorganized the Estonian-Latvian Joint Theory Days (2-4 February, 2024)
  • February 1, 2024: We are joined by a new postdoc Bora Bugra Sezer.
  • January 31, 2024: Our paper "Constant-Size zk-SNARKs in ROM from Falsifiable Assumptions" (Helger Lipmaa, Roberto Parisella, Janno Siim) was accepted to the Eurocrypt 2024 Conference!

2023

  • December 22, 2023: Our paper "Title: Lookup Arguments: Improvements, Extensions and Applications to Zero-Knowledge Decision Trees" (Matteo Campanelli, Antonio Faonio, Dario Fiore, Tianyu Li, Helger Lipmaa) was accepted to the PKC 2024 conference! See https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1518 for the eprint version.
  • December 7, 2023: Helger Lipmaa presented his paper On Black-Box Knowledge-Sound Commit-And-Prove SNARKs at Asiacrypt 2023. See for the video.
  • December 2, 2023: Roberto Parisella presented our paper Algebraic Group Model with Oblivious Sampling (Helger Lipmaa, Roberto Parisella, Janno Siim) at TCC 2023. See for the video (start at 39:00).
  • November 1, 2023: Helger Lipmaa rejoins the cryptography group as a leader. Many thanks to Dominique Unruh, who did it before that! (Dominique continues with 20%.)

2018 --- 2023

This news feed was not maintained.

2018

2017

  • Helger Lipmaa has several positions within a new Horizon 2020 project
  • December 1, 2017: Open Position: Research Fellow in Cryptography
    • Helger Lipmaa has a permanent position in his group
  • November 24-26, 2017: Estonian-Latvian Joint Theory Days is organized in Tartu
  • November 21-28, 2017: Research visit by Bingsheng Zhang
  • November 6-8, 2017: Nordsec 2017 is organized in Tartu
  • November 4-10, 2017: Research visit by Prastudy Fauzi
  • November 7, 2017 (and following Tuesdays): Presentation of student projects in Research Seminar in Cryptography: see schedule
  • October 2017: Our paper "A Subversion-Resistant SNARK" (Behzad Abdolmaleki, Karim Baghery, Helger Lipmaa, Michał Zając) from Asiacrypt 2017 was one of the three papers to be invited to Journal of Cryptology
  • August 2017: Helger Lipmaa the scientific coordinator for University of Tartu of the H2020 European project "PRIViLEDGE" (Privacy-Enhancing Cryptography in Distributed Ledgers), that focuses on Blockchain technology. The project starts from Jan 1, 2018.
  • August 2017: Three papers from University of Tartu were accepted to Asiacrypt 2017
  • June 5, 2017: PhD defense of Jaak Randmets
  • April 12, 2017: Ph.D. defense of Rafik Chaabouni at EPFL. Helger Lipmaa was cosupervisor
  • February 17, 2017: Ph.D. defense of Prastudy Fauzi
  • February 16, 2017: Invited talk by Carla Ràfols

2016

  • October 1, 2016: Helger Lipmaa's group was joined by new MSc student Annabell Kuldmaa
  • April 1, 2016: Helger Lipmaa's group was joined by new PhD students Behzad Abdolmaleki and Karim Baghery
  • March 15, 2016: Invited talk by Kurt Rohloff
  • March 14, 2016: Ph.D. defense of Riivo Talviste
  • From January 1, 2016, we were joined by Michal Zajac (his responsibility is local coordination of the Panoramix project) and Janno Siim.

2014

04.07.2014 New PhD students accepted: Ivo Kubjas and Yauhen Yakimenka (both supervised by Vitaly Skachek)

2013