Zero Knowledge

This week, Anna is joined by Nico and Kobi to speak with Mathias Hall-Andersen and Giorgio Dell'Immagine from zkSecurity about zkGolf, a competition challenging humans and AI agents to build the most efficient, formally verified ZK circuits.

They look back at ZK Hack puzzles and CTFs, exploring how AI is changing the nature of technical competitions. They then dive into Clean, zkSecurity's framework for writing and formally verifying circuits in Lean, and how an experiment using AI to optimize a SHA-256 circuit inspired zkGolf.

They discuss how the zkGolf competition works, the breakthroughs and exploits participants have uncovered, how it compares to other AI-driven optimisation challenges, and what AI-assisted circuit development could mean for the future of ZK engineering and security audits.



Related Links


zkGolf Website 
Clean GitHub Repo 
Clean Website
Lean Programming Website
ZK Hack
Yukon Website 
ZK Podcast: Auto Research on Yukon with Soubhik Deb
ZK Podcast: Alex Ozdemir on where Theorem Provers and ZK meet 
ECDSA.fail  
SNARK.fast Flock Challenge
The Proximity Prize








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This week, Anna and Guillermo chat with Josh Yang, CEO and co-founder of Brightlight Photonics, about the lasers that power quantum computers. Josh explains how lasers are used in neutral atom and other atom-based quantum systems to cool and move atoms, manipulate qubit states and read out results. They explore why these systems require so many different lasers and how today’s bulky, expensive optical setups can become a bottleneck as quantum computers scale.

They also cover Brightlight’s work miniaturising the Ti:sapphire laser, a longstanding workhorse of quantum optics. Josh explains how integrated waveguides and semiconductor manufacturing techniques make this possible, the challenges of packaging and powering these tiny lasers, and how a more compact, versatile laser platform could better support quantum computing.

This one is a departure from the usual topics covered on the show, but we hope you find it as fascinating as we did.



Related Links
Brightlight Photonics
Josh Yang Google Scholar Profile
Episode 357: Quantum Engineering with Jelena Vučković
Stanford Report: Chip-scale titanium-sapphire laser puts powerful technology in reach 
Titanium:Sapphire-on-insulator for broadband tunable lasers and high-power amplifiers on chip
Titanium:sapphire-on-insulator integrated lasers and amplifiers
Multi-dimensional data transmission using inverse-designed silicon photonics and microcombs
Brightlight Photonics Images shared by Josh Yang
Episode 400: Quantum Advances, Hybrid Signatures and SNARKs to the Rescue with Dan Boneh
Episode 402: The Quantum Question Panel – Live from zkSummit14








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This week, Anna, Tarun and Nico are joined by JP Aumasson, co-designer of BLAKE3, author of Serious Cryptography and cryptography engineer at Cloudflare. They revisit the quantum threat to cryptography, looking at recent advances in quantum attacks on RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography, and discuss why JP remains cautious about predictions of an imminent “Q-day.” They then explore how AI is changing cryptanalysis, from recent RSA factoring records to the growing divide between symmetric and asymmetric cryptography.

The conversation then turns to Poseidon and recent attacks that have challenged confidence in ZK-friendly hash functions, as well as China’s new NGCC competition, where AI is already being used to find weaknesses in candidate designs. JP shares his experiments using AI for cryptanalysis, why it could accelerate both the building and breaking of cryptographic systems, and a introduces a project exploring AI-driven attacks on hash functions.



Related Links


Too Much Crypto by Jean-Philippe Aumasson
Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies against Quantum Vulnerabilities: Resource Estimates and Mitigations 
Flock: Fast Proving for Batch Boolean Computations
Flock Challenge
POSEIDON: A New Hash Function for Zero-Knowledge Proof Systems (Updated Version) 
Ngcc.dev
Chinese NGCC Algorithms: The First Week of AI Cryptanalysis
JP Aumasson Papers
Yukon.org
ZK Podcast Episode: The Quantum Question Panel – Live from zkSummit14!
ZK Podcast Episode: Quantum Advances, Hybrid Signatures and SNARKs to the Rescue with Dan Boneh








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This week, Anna is joined by Soubhik Deb, Head of Research at EigenLabs, to explore Yukon, a platform for collaborative AI-powered research. Soubhik traces the project’s origins to ECDSA.fail, a competition launched in response to Google’s work on more resource-efficient quantum circuits for breaking secp256k1. They discuss how researchers and their AI agents build on one another’s submissions, turning traditional research into a multiplayer process that can iterate at machine speed.

The conversation then explores Yukon’s expansion into ZK proving, inference optimisation, coding theory and mathematics through challenges like SNARK.fast, better.codes, mlx.fast and lighter.fast. Soubhik explains the importance of well-defined problems and verifiers for AI-driven research, and shares Yukon’s vision for an “AI-native scientific institution” where humans and agents collaborate to accelerate discovery.



Related Links
Yukon.org
ECDSA.fail 
Flock Challenge
The Proximity Prize (better.codes)
Mlx.fast
Darkbloom
Lighter Prover Challenge
ECDSA.Fail: Open Autoresearch for Optimizing Elliptic-Curve Point Addition in Shor’s Algorithm
Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms
Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies against Quantum Vulnerabilities: Resource Estimates and Mitigations 
ZK Podcast Episode: The Quantum Question Panel – Live from zkSummit14!
ZK Podcast Episode: Quantum Advances, Hybrid Signatures and SNARKs to the Rescue with Dan Boneh








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This week, Anna and Kobi are joined by Ron Rothblum, Professor of Computer Science at Technion and researcher at Succinct. They catch up on Ron’s move from theory into practice, including his work on the SP1 zkVM, Jagged Polynomial Commitments, and a recent Fiat-Shamir attack that exposed vulnerabilities in practical uses of GKR. Ron explains what the attack revealed about Fiat-Shamir’s security assumptions and why it prompted changes to deployed systems.



The conversation then explores Ron’s recent work on faster and more efficient proof systems, from Blaze, TensorSwitch, BOLT and Veil to Flock, a proof system for batch proving Boolean computations. They discuss how new approaches to polynomial commitments and error-correcting codes can improve prover performance, before turning to snark.fast and zkGolf, experiments using AI agents to optimise provers and circuits. Ron shares what these efforts reveal about AI-assisted research and engineering, and how pushing proving closer to the speed of ordinary computation could unlock entirely new applications for verifiable computation.



Related Links
Jagged Polynomial Commitments (or: How to Stack Multilinears)
The Random Oracle Methodology, Revisited
Blaze: Fast SNARKs from Interleaved RAA Codes 
TensorSwitch: Nearly Optimal Polynomial Commitments from Tensor Codes 
Flock: Fast Proving for Batch Boolean Computations 
VEIL: Lightweight Zero-Knowledge for Hash-Based Multilinear Proof Systems
Bolt: Faster SNARKs from Sketched Codes
zkGolf Website
Proving as Fast as Computing: Succinct Arguments with Constant Prover Overhead 
SNARK.fast Website
ZK Podcast Episode: Error Correcting Codes & Information Theory with Ron Rothblum
Fiat-Shamir via List-Recoverable Codes (or: Parallel Repetition of GMW is not Zero-Knowledge) 
Delegating Computation: Interactive Proofs for Muggles
How to Prove False Statements: Practical Attacks on Fiat-Shamir












**If you like what we do:**

* Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree
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Read transcript