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1. Batchman and Robin: Batched and Non-batched Branching for Interactive ZK

   Yibin Yang, David Heath (November 2023, ACM CCS 2023)

   Cas Cremers and Engin Kirda (Ed.)

   Vector Oblivious Linear Evaluation (VOLE) supports fast and scalable interactive Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs. Despite recent improvements to VOLE-based ZK, compiling proof statements to a control-flow oblivious form (e.g., a circuit) continues to lead to expensive proofs. One useful setting where this inefficiency stands out is when the statement is a disjunction of clauses $$\mathcal{L}_1 \lor \cdots \lor \mathcal{L}_B$$. Typically, ZK requires paying the price to handle all $$B$$ branches. Prior works have shown how to avoid this price in communication, but not in computation. Our main result, $$\mathsf{Batchman}$$, is asymptotically and concretely efficient VOLE-based ZK for batched disjunctions, i.e. statements containing $$R$$ repetitions of the same disjunction. This is crucial for, e.g., emulating CPU steps in ZK. Our prover and verifier complexity is only $$\bigO(RB+R|\C|+B|\C|)$$, where $$|\C|$$ is the maximum circuit size of the $$B$$ branches. Prior works' computation scales in $$RB|\C|$$. For non-batched disjunctions, we also construct a VOLE-based ZK protocol, $$\mathsf{Robin}$$, which is (only) communication efficient. For small fields and for statistical security parameter $$\lambda$$, this protocol's communication improves over the previous state of the art ($$\mathsf{Mac'n'Cheese}$$, Baum et al., CRYPTO'21) by up to factor $$\lambda$$. Our implementation outperforms prior state of the art. E.g., we achieve up to $$6\times$$ improvement over $$\mathsf{Mac'n'Cheese}$$ (Boolean, single disjunction), and for arithmetic batched disjunctions our experiments show we improve over $$\mathsf{QuickSilver}$$ (Yang et al., CCS'21) by up to $$70\times$$ and over $$\mathsf{AntMan}$$ (Weng et al., CCS'22) by up to $$36\times$$. 

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2. Effects of food supplementation and helminth removal on space use and spatial overlap in wild rodent populations

   https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.14067  

   Mistrick, Janine; Veitch, Jasmine_S M; Kitchen, Shannon M; Clague, Samuel; Newman, Brent C; Hall, Richard J; Budischak, Sarah A; Forbes, Kristian M; Craft, Meggan E (June 2024, Journal of Animal Ecology)

   Abstract Animal space use and spatial overlap can have important consequences for population‐level processes such as social interactions and pathogen transmission. Identifying how environmental variability and inter‐individual variation affect spatial patterns and in turn influence interactions in animal populations is a priority for the study of animal behaviour and disease ecology. Environmental food availability and macroparasite infection are common drivers of variation, but there are few experimental studies investigating how they affect spatial patterns of wildlife.Bank voles (Clethrionomys glareolus) are a tractable study system to investigate spatial patterns of wildlife and are amenable to experimental manipulations. We conducted a replicated, factorial field experiment in which we provided supplementary food and removed helminths in vole populations in natural forest habitat and monitored vole space use and spatial overlap using capture–mark–recapture methods.Using network analysis, we quantified vole space use and spatial overlap. We compared the effects of food supplementation and helminth removal and investigated the impacts of season, sex and reproductive status on space use and spatial overlap.We found that food supplementation decreased vole space use while helminth removal increased space use. Space use also varied by sex, reproductive status and season. Spatial overlap was similar between treatments despite up to threefold differences in population size.By quantifying the spatial effects of food availability and macroparasite infection on wildlife populations, we demonstrate the potential for space use and population density to trade‐off and maintain consistent spatial overlap in wildlife populations. This has important implications for spatial processes in wildlife including pathogen transmission. 

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3. Soil and plant biogeochemical and soil temperature variables collected at brown lemming (Lemmus trimucronatus) and tundra vole (Microtus oeconomus) structure sties near Nome, Toolik Lake, and Utqaigvik, Alaska, summer 2018-2020

   https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/bfb12a6cf2ccf923df22bce8e4353f69  

   Roy, Austin; McLaren, Jennie (June 2022, Environmental Data Initiative)

   Soil and plant sampling analysis under small mammal-built structures and controls sites from near the Team Vole fences: Nome, Toolik, Utqiagvik, AK 2018-2020. 

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4. LogRobin++: Optimizing Proofs of Disjunctive Statements in VOLE-Based ZK

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-0935-2_12  

   Hazay, Carmit; Heath, David; Kolesnikov, Vladimir; Venkitasubramaniam, Muthuramakrishnan; Yang, Yibin (December 2024, Springer Nature Singapore)

   In the Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) of a disjunctive statement, P and V agree on B fan-in 2 circuits C0, . . . , CB−1 over a field F; each circuit has n_in inputs, n_× multiplications, and one output. P’s goal is to demonstrate the knowledge of a witness (id ∈ [B], w ∈ F^n_in ), s.t. Cid (w) = 0 where neither w nor id is revealed. Disjunctive statements are effective, for example, in implementing ZKP based on sequential execution of CPU steps. This paper studies ZKP (of knowledge) protocols over disjunctive statements based on Vector OLE. Denoting by λ the statistical security parameter and let ρ \in^\Delta max{log |F|, λ}, the previous state-of-the-art protocol Robin (Yang et al. CCS’23) required (n_in +3n_×) log |F|+O(ρB) bits of communication with O(1) rounds, and Mac'n'Cheese (Baum et al. CRYPTO’21) required (n_in +n_×) log |F|+2n×ρ+O(ρ logB) bits of communication with O(logB) rounds, both in the VOLE-hybrid model. Our novel protocol LogRobin++ achieves the same functionality at the cost of (n_in+n_×) log |F|+O(ρ logB) bits of communication with O(1) rounds in the VOLE-hybrid model. Crucially, LogRobin++ takes advantage of two new techniques – (1) an O(logB)-overhead approach to prove in ZK that an IT-MAC commitment vector contains a zero; and (2) the realization of VOLE-based ZK over a disjunctive statement, where P commits only to w and multiplication outputs of Cid (w) (as opposed to prior work where P commits to w and all three wires that are associated with each multiplication gate). We implemented LogRobin++ over Boolean (i.e., F2) and arithmetic (i.e., F_2^61−1) fields. In our experiments, including the cost of generating VOLE correlations, LogRobin++ achieved up to 170× optimization over Robin in communication, resulting in up to 7× (resp. 3×) wall-clock time improvements in a WAN-like (resp. LAN-like) setting. 

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5. Tight ZK CPU: Batched ZK Branching with Cost Proportional to Evaluated Instruction

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3658644.3690289  

   Yang, Yibin; Heath, David; Hazay, Carmit; Kolesnikov, Vladimir; Venkitasubramaniam, Muthuramakrishnan (December 2024, ACM)

   We explore Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) of statements expressed as programs written in high-level languages, e.g., C or assembly. At the core of executing such programs in ZK is the repeated evaluation of a CPU step, achieved by branching over the CPU’s instruction set. This approach is general and covers traversal-execution of a program’s control flow graph (CFG): here CPU instructions are straight-line program fragments (of various sizes) associated with the CFG nodes. This highlights the usefulness of ZK CPUs with a large number of instructions of varying sizes. We formalize and design an efficient tight ZK CPU, where the cost (both computation and communication, for each party) of each step depends only on the instruction taken. This qualitatively improves over state of the art, where cost scales with the size of the largest CPU instruction (largest CFG node). Our technique is formalized in the standard commit-and-prove paradigm, so our results are compatible with a variety of (interactive and non-interactive) general-purpose ZK. We implemented an interactive tight arithmetic (over F261−1) ZK CPU based on Vector Oblivious Linear Evaluation (VOLE) and compared it to the state-of-the-art non-tight VOLE-based ZK CPU Batchman (Yang et al. CCS’23). In our experiments, under the same hardware configuration, we achieve comparable performance when instructions are of the same size and a 5-18× improvement when instructions are of varied size. Our VOLE-based tight ZK CPU (over F261−1) can execute 100K (resp. 450K) multiplication gates per second in a WAN-like (resp. LAN-like) setting. It requires ≤ 102 Bytes per multiplication gate. Our basic building block, ZK Unbalanced Read-Only Memory, may be of independent interest. 

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