ZK HACK - Introduction and Puzzle 5 Prize Announcement

Transcript

hey okay welcome everybody to uh the sixth session in the zk hack event uh zk hack is brought to you by the xero knowledge validator and the zero knowledge podcast i'm part of both of those orgs if you are not a subscriber to the podcast yet please head over to this the podcast website where you can subscribe wherever you get your podcast um you can also check out the ck validator we're going to learn a little bit more about them shortly uh it's also a company that i am part of so what is zk hack though zika hack is a seven week event series and puzzle competition and we are now in the sixth week of these seven weeks which is wild i'm so excited this uh in this in the

zika hack what we tend to do is have a workshop every week and every week we also kick off a puzzle hacking competition where you're looking at broken advanced cryptography protocols and you're trying to find the bug and exploit it the reason we do this is to learn about applied zero knowledge cryptography and as well as like onboarding more people into the ck space generate new ideas hopefully make new connections between participants maybe maybe right now this is the group that's going to be building the next generation of zk projects this is what we're hoping so i just learned today that there's some folks that are not yet in the discord i really really really want to highlight that you should head over to the discord the zk hack discord is where

we keep in touch during the week this is also like a hub becoming a bit of a hub for like learning about zk tech we definitely want to develop that more in a direction so it's not just an event kind of discord server so please do head over there if you're not there already uh we'd love to see you there there we go you can also follow us on twitter and you should probably sign up for the newsletter on zkhac.dev if you haven't already as well people will always ask every session about the videos so the videos will be will be published they tend to be published like 24 hours from now and they are going to be on the zero knowledge podcast youtube channel so if you're not already subscribed there you could subscribe to

be reminded when these come out here is the team that uh has put together zk hack it's myself kobe susannah and tanya and you can see kind of everyone typing around so you'll meet sort of everyone from this while you're here i want to say a big thank you to the partners of zk hack so anoma and alia were our puzzle building partners they built these six puzzles that we get to hack on so thank you very much to those par to our partners we also have our gold sponsors iden iii aztec starkware and mina and it's these six companies that have been hosting the workshops that we've been seeing we have silver sponsors horizon osmosis geometry figment cello and polychain as

well as bronze sponsors lambda alex zero penumbra manta panther and vac we also have our media partners zk proof and zero knowledge soul so what are you doing when you're at the zk hack well you can always visit a workshop hack a puzzle win a prize and hopefully would meet your future collaborators so i want to invite kobe to the stage to tell us a little bit about this session like this past puzzle that we are just uh ending now which is was puzzle five hello kobe welcome hello there seems to be some argument in the chat as to whether or not corn is a fruit

uh yes i think it's also sometimes classified as a grain so i don't know okay but today i will leave that topic i think it's going to be too too controversial so okay but today you are a box of popcorn i am a boxer very nice okay all right so let's talk about puzzle five um okay so puzzle five is called to be adaptive is to be strong uh also known as strong adaptivity for those that try to solve it um and the puzzle was pretty nice like we got 23 valid

responses and all of them actually came in pretty quick during the first day most of them which was a nice surprise to see and as usual we got really really good write-ups and we'll publish of course both the winning one and the other ones later today and specifically the puzzle was about as previously it was a sigma protocol that was converted from an interactive protocol to a non-interactive one using the feature mirror heuristic but it was done in an improper way

and what that allowed for malicious prover to do is because we did not commit to or did not include in the hashes every input that we should have and specifically which did not include some input commitments we could have adaptively chosen them according to the challenge that we got during the protocol and that allowed people to break the protocol and create a proof that is breaking the security of the protocol so what's been interesting about this puzzle is that the interactive protocol is secure there's no problem with it but when it was converted to a

non-interactive one that's when it was broken so [Music] congrats to everyone that solved it good job and yeah as usual susanna will later afterwards announce the winners um and yeah i think one last thing that could be interesting for us to know we've seen some interesting question on discord which is about what was the most interesting puzzle and what would be what did you find most challenging what did you find most i don't know intellectually satisfying so we'd really really love to hear your thoughts about this and

we later asked it in a more structured manner but yeah please feel free to share more thoughts about this and we'd love to know totally that that is in the general so that's in the discord uh server in the general chat somebody actually had asked what was what was people's favorites and we'd love to hear actually from the puzzle hackers a little bit more about what they thought um thanks kobe thanks for the wrap up so i want to invite will uh to the stage will is my co-founder at the zk validator and will's gonna give so this week the zk validator is actually sponsoring the prizes hey will hi so yeah do you want to tell us a little

bit about what zk validator is all about i'm will i'm all the founders of gtv alongside anna um and for those who don't know us ck validator is an organization whose primary mission is to support and accelerate the use of privacy tech and zero knowledge proofs for web3 so amongst other things we organize events like this one um and anna suzanne and kobe who you've all seen over the last few weeks um and zk validator runs validators on basically all of the major proof of stake networks like cosmos polka dot near kasama moon river nina osmosis and uh are working on supporting lots of smaller early stage ones on testnet and um

we essentially then work with like the ecosystems of those networks as well as researchers and developers who want to build anything using um we run events participating governance discussions to promote privacy and also can help support teams in different ways financially at the moment we just kicked off the bitcoin grants round which you can find out more about um where we're helping uh like teams that want to build receive grants uh for for using zero knowledge proofs um and if you enjoy this event and the other work that we do you can delegate to our validator on things that we're currently supporting and also really happy to be sponsoring the prizes for the latest set of winners

ezekiel hack congratulations all right thanks will why don't you stick around for a sec susanna do you want to join the stage now suzanne is also part of the zkv team and suzanne is always the prize announcer so there you go hey hey hey you're working this time right yeah working great okay cool yeah we've got like almost all the squad up here right yeah so as like usual first prize 2500 usdc second and third 1000 and the best write-up is 500.

so this week the best write-up goes to great yeah we were talking about that before if the j is an i there but yeah i mean let us know how to pronounce it actually would be interesting um but yeah in third place it was kev and zach i'm from aztec so well done um it was very close this round actually and as you'll see from the scores because in second place we had all five so not point two of a point difference so the submissions came in really like

at the very similar time and then first place this week it is william again so congratulations um yeah a lot of like really high scores in this round so i'll be posting the solution and you'll see all the spoils and everything soon but yeah congrats very cool thank you susanna thank you will thanks to everybody who's who uh submitted a puzzle solution this time around yeah just to point it out like i mean it's awesome to see some newcomers too kevin zach making the top three even though it was their first time uh submitting and uh yeah like you can tell like the time difference is what kind of

determines the score distribution you can see how close these ones were compared to the other ones anyway thanks again everyone all right so i'm going to continue on with our intro i want to share a little bit about what's coming up because i have your attention now and there's some events and some things that i that i hope you'll pay attention to and potentially participate in so uh next week we have the mina uh workshop so that's the last zk hack workshop and there's also actually yeah i think china just shared that so there's also a mina boot camp that's happening after zk hack ends

and that is something where they're actually like accepting submissions for this right now they opened it up sort of especially for us and this is open until midnight tonight they already have a ton of submissions so like they're kind of overflowing but they know that there's great people here at the zika hack and so they wanted to just offer this the mina boot camp will be like a deep dive that goes further than the workshop that they're doing next week um yeah i also want to let you all know if you haven't already please sign up for the zk hack virtual party and zike hack or zk jobs fair so we're doing these two things in tandem there's a jobs fair with some great teams who are hiring as well as this party area where

you could potentially meet with other puzzle hackers workshop participants please do come check it out uh this is i've been i've been texting or it like sending individual dms to a lot of you to just like let you know about this i want this to kind of be like the zk party of the fall maybe like it's a little early but maybe like our early christmas party or something like that we did do a zk hack kickoff party in lisbon this one is not quite our closing but we are getting close to the end i'd love to see you come out so yeah you just sign up on eventbrite and we're going to share the link to a to a gather.town location after that uh we're probably going to send that out

i think tomorrow or the day after so you'll get that link cool we also mentioned the bitcoin zk tech side round so this is kind of a new thing that we're doing uh git coin does these matching rounds where people can donate to individual projects and then there's matching pools that are sort of attributed to these different grants depending on how many small donations they received we now have secured 75k in matching funding just for zk tech and this is the amazing teams that are contributing to this xeronaut validator diversified dust geometry alio ox park polygon and aztec so this is a pool of matching funds the reason i think it's

so key that i'm telling this audience is if you have as like a zero knowledge open source not funded by a vc project it could be very early stage you could be an individual contributor on some existing open source tech please submit a grant it's really easy to do you just need a little bit of text you don't have it's not a huge grant process but we'd love to see some really talented really top quality zktec projects be put into this matching round this is going to also allow us to potentially spot new projects this is like great for early stage stuff if you're just getting your if you're just getting started or you're building something you think is neat and you haven't really shared it this would be a great starting point you get funding

from the community and you get funding from the matching pool so yeah i really hope you'll you'll check that out oh yeah and there's the t-shirts sorry i'm going a little bit over for our a lot of time but i'll try to be quick we have leftover zk hack t-shirts from if you are a puzzle hacker and want some of these please sign up i think we have a forum for you to submit some address if you want us to actually mail these to you we do have i think we have like about 90. so uh yeah we have quite a few we could give out still yeah and just a reminder go over to the website check out the schedule sign up for anything you need to uh sign up for a mailing list and all that okay we're done i this is the end of the intro

uh i want to yeah thank you all again for being here and i want to invite our uh our workshop host from elio to the stage so errol perfect there you are very cool