Episode 321: STIR with Gal Arnon & Giacomo Fenzi

In this week’s episode, Anna (https://twitter.com/annarrose) and Kobi (https://twitter.com/kobigurk) chat with Gal Arnon (https://galarnon42.github.io/), Ph.D student from the Weizmann Institute of Science (https://weizmann.ac.il/pages/) & Giacomo Fenzi (https://twitter.com/GiacomoFenzi), Ph.D. student in the COMPSEC Lab (https://compsec.epfl.ch/) at EPFL (https://epfl.ch/). Gal and Giacomo are amongst the co-authors of ‘STIR: Reed–Solomon Proximity Testing with Fewer Queries’ (https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/390) and in this conversation, they discuss how their research led them to work on these topics and where the thesis for this particular work sparked from. They set the stage by exploring the history of FRI and discussing some hidden nuances in how FRI works. And then they introduce STIR, a system that can be used in place of FRI, which incorporates various optimisations to improve the performance. Here’s some additional links for this episode: FRIDA: Data Availability Sampling from FRI by Hall-Andersen, Simkin and Wagner (https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/248.pdf) Lattice-Based Polynomial Commitments: Towards Asymptotic and Concrete Efficiency by Fenzi, Moghaddas and Nguyen (https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/846.pdf) DEEP-FRI: Sampling Outside the Box Improves Soundness by Ben-Sasson, Goldberg, Kopparty and Saraf (https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/336.pdf) Proximity Gaps for Reed–Solomon Codes by Ben-Sasson, Carmon, Ishai, Kopparty and Saraf (https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/654.pdf) IOPs with Inverse Polynomial Soundness Error by Arnon, Chiesa and Yogev (https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1062.pdf) Episode 293: Exploring Security of ZK Systems with Nethermind’s Michał & Albert (https://zeroknowledge.fm/293-2/) Circle STARKs by Haböck, Levit and Papini (https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/278.pdf) Episode 304: Exploring FRI, LogUp and using M31 for STARKs with Ulrich Haböck (https://zeroknowledge.fm/304-2/) FRI-Binius: Improved Polynomial Commitments for Binary Towers (https://www.ulvetanna.io/news/fri-binius) The next ZK Hack IRL is happening May 17-19 in Kraków, apply to join now at zkkrakow.com (https://www.zkkrakow.com/) Aleo (http://aleo.org/) 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/ (http://aleo.org/) If you like what we do: * Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree (https://linktr.ee/zeroknowledge) * Subscribe to our podcast newsletter (https://zeroknowledge.substack.com) * Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm (https://twitter.com/zeroknowledgefm) * Join us on Telegram (https://zeroknowledge.fm/telegram) * Catch us on YouTube (https://zeroknowledge.fm/)