主题：JesseQ: Efficient Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Circuits over Any Field

嘉宾：区文浩  香港理工大学  教授

时间：2025年11月3日 上午10:00 – 11:30

地点：华中科技大学 学术交流服务中心一号楼211会议室

报告摘要：

Zero-knowledge proofs, a fundamental cryptographic primitive, enable one party to convince another of the validity of a statement without revealing any additional information. Recent advancements have highlighted VOLE-based protocols as a highly efficient approach for generating zero-knowledge proofs at scale, opening up new possibilities for real-time, privacy-preserving computation.

In this talk, we introduce JesseQ, our latest zero-knowledge proof system built on Vector Oblivious Linear Evaluation (VOLE). JesseQ supports both arithmetic and Boolean circuits over any field and achieves high performance with minimal overhead. A key highlight of JesseQ is its ability to prove 9.2 trillion AND gates on a low-cost AWS instance for just $1, demonstrating exceptional scalability and cost-effectiveness. Finally, we discuss the practical applications of VOLE-based proofs in real-world scenarios such as verifiable computation, and private authentication.

报告人简介：

Prof. Man Ho Allen Au is a Professor and Associate Head (Research and Development) in the Department of Computing, and Director of Research Centre for Blockchain Technology at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He previously held faculty positions at the University of Hong Kong and the University of Wollongong. His research interests lie in information security, cryptography, blockchain technology, and their practical applications.

Prof. Au has authored over 200 refereed papers in top-tier journals and conferences, including CRYPTO, ASIACRYPT, ACM CCS, NDSS, IEEE S&P, SIGMOD, SOSP, IEEE TIFS, and IEEE TDSC. His work has been recognized with several prestigious honours, including the 2024–25 Hong Kong Engineering Science and Technology (HKEST) Award, the 2023 BOCHK Science and Technology Innovation Prize (STIP) in FinTech, and as a two-time winner of the international ZPrize competition.

He has served as general and pc chair for numerous international conferences, such as ACM ASIACCS, RAID, SECURECOM, IEEE Blockchain, ISPEC, and PROVSEC. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC) and the Journal of Information Security and Applications (JISA). In addition, Prof. Au is an Advisory Board member of ELSP Blockchain and a member of the CBDC Expert Group of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority.