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.
If you're interested in attending, please sign up for the mailing list to receive updates about upcoming talks. There is an option to join virtually on Zoom.
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 CoDa E160.

Summer 2026

Upcoming

Abstract: Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge, or SNARKs, allow a prover to efficiently convince a verifier that a computation was performed correctly. They are increasingly used in settings such as cloud computing and blockchains. Most existing SNARK research focuses either on improving proof protocols or on designing program representations that are more compatible with them. CoBBl instead introduces an execution model that more closely ties program representation with the underlying proof system. CoBBl uses a block-based execution model that can be instantiated over a wide range of existing proof protocols. By exposing proof-system-specific structure, it avoids inefficiencies found in conventional SNARK execution models and enables the compiler to apply proof-oriented optimizations more broadly than previous systems. Together, these techniques reduce proving time by 3 - 5x compared with state-of-the-art SNARK systems. The work is a collaboration among Kunming, Fraser, and Riad.

Bio: Kunming Jiang is a fourth-year PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University advised by Fraser Brown and Riad Wahby.

Past