Stanford Security Lunch

Welcome to Security Lunch. We host speakers from both industry and academia to give talks related to applied cryptography, and system and network security.
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If you're interested in giving a talk, we would love to have you! Please find more details in the About page.
You can find the upcoming and past talks for the current quarter below. We meet every Wednesday, 12 pm in Gates 415.

Fall 2023

Upcoming

Abstract: Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) can be used to build private, secure applications (for example: private payment systems). However, security requires application logic to be correctly expressed as finite field (FF) equations that are passed as input to the ZKP. Bugs in the equations can totally compromise the system. For example, one missing equation could render a payment system insolvent. In this talk, I'll discuss recent developments in bug-finding and verification for FF equations. First, I'll explain how to extend an SMT solver so that it can comprehend FF equations. Second, I'll explain how to use the solver to partially verify a compiler to FF equations. Along the way, I'll discuss some bugs we've found in an existing compiler to FF equations.

Bio: Alex Ozdemir is a PhD student at Stanford in the Center for Automated Reasoning and the Applied Cryptography group. His research uses ideas from cryptography, compilers, and verification to improve tools for secure computation (such as zero-knowledge proofs and multi-party computations).

Past