Matteo Campanelli

Matteo Campanelli

Cryptography Researcher;
Programming Enthusiast

I’m a research scientist at Protocol Labs. I mostly work on efficient zero-knowledge proof systems, their building blocks, their foundations and their applications. My interest is in cryptography at large.

I previously worked as a post-doctoral researcher at Aarhus University with Claudio Orlandi (2020-2021) and at the IMDEA Software Institute with Dario Fiore (2018-2020).

While at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), I worked with Rosario Gennaro; in 2018 both Rosario and CUNY made the careless blunder of giving me a PhD.

Research

My work has appearead at top- and high-rank cryptographic conferences. For a full list of publications, see my Google Scholar page. Below you can find my work organized by question/topic rather than year/conference.

In some of my latest projects I worked on questions as:

  • How can we best combine techniques from fast proof schemes (e.g., Spartan) with those from extremely succinct proofs (e.g., Groth16) obtaining a small (universal) setup? [Testudo paper] [Testudo blog post]
  • What are the efficiency tradeoffs of SNARKs with a single (universal) setup? [Lunar paper] [Anaïs Querol’s slides] [Lunar code]](https://github.com/imdea-software/lunar)
  • Can we construct efficient commit-and-prove SNARKs (SNARKs over committed inputs) with a single (universal) setup? [Lunar paper] [ECLIPSE paper] [Lunar&ECLIPSE slides]
  • Can we design and compose specialized SNARKs efficiently and simply? [LegoSNARK paper] [slides] [LegoSNARK code]
  • How much can we decentralize authenticated data structures? [paper]
  • How can we prove set-membership efficiently and privately (applications to whitelisting, anonymous cryptocurrencies, etc.)? [paper] (see also Veksel and Curve Trees below)
  • How can we prove batch set-membership succinctly and efficiently compose it with other SNARKs? [HARiSA paper] [Talk by Dario Fiore]
  • Can we construct linear-map vector commitments from already deployed setups? How to make them maintainable generically? How to use them? [paper]
  • Can we extend existing lookup arguments so to apply them efficiently to zero-knowledge for machine learning? [paper]

Witness-Encryption-like Primitives

  • Encryption to the Future: How can we emulate WE to pass state long-term in decentralized networks? [paper]
  • How to simply approximate witness encryption through witness-authenticated key exchange? [paper]
  • How to marry witness encryption and succinct functional commitments for fun and (theoretical&practical) profit? [paper] [slides]

On Theory for Cryptographic Proofs

  • What are theoretical limits for extractable arguments with nice composability features? [paper] [slides]
  • How much can we push designated-verifier primitives to achieve some level of public-verifiability? [paper]
  • How to use obfuscation to compile designated-verifier primitives into publically verifiable ones? And can we compile other primitives in a similar manner? [paper]

Efficient Proofs in Cryptocurrencies

  • Can we go beyond Merkle Trees for fast, transparent, succinct zero-knowledge proofs of set membership? [Curve Trees paper] [Slides USENIX talk] [Curve Trees code]
  • How can we obtain efficient anonymous payments from well-studied assumptions? [Veksel paper] [Veksel code]
  • How (not) to pay for digital goods and services on Bitcoin? [paper]
  • How to construct Zero-Knowledge on Homomorphic commitments to KV maps (a “Z-KeyWee”, or Z🥝) and how to use them for anonymous cryptocurrencies? [paper]

Proofs of Space

  • How to apply (non-trivially) polynomial evaluation techniques to make decentralized storage more scalable? [paper]

Rationality and Fine-Grained Cryptography

ZK Standards

I was co-chair of the working group leading the effort to standardize (commit/encrypt)-and-prove in zero-knowledge proofs. Some resources:

Teaching

Program Committees

  • Asiacrypt 2023
  • CCS 2023
  • CIFRIS 2023
  • ACNS 2023
  • ACNS 2022
  • ICPC 2021