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:

• EdSIDH: Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange on Edwards Curves by Azarderakhsh, Lang, Jao and Koziel
• Efficient Signature Generation by Smart Cards by Schnorr
• FROST: Flexible Round-Optimized Schnorr Threshold Signatures by Komlo and Goldberg
• Episode 316: Alin Tomescu on Distributed On-chain Randomness and Keyless Accounts
• Episode 295: Return to MPC with Nigel Smart
• On the insecurity of ROS by Benhamouda, Lepoint, Loss, Orru and Raykova
• Re-Randomized FROST by Gouvea and Komlo
• Frostsnap
• CFRG GitHub Repository for FROST
• Arctic: Lightweight and Stateless Threshold Schnorr Signatures by Komlo and Goldberg

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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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