There's been some claims made recently that a compromise of the Zcash trusted setup can't compromise privacy.
I checked with one of the cryptographers working on zk-SNARKs, and these claims are false.
A compromised MPC absolutely can wreck privacy; Zooko needs to correct this.
I checked with one of the cryptographers working on zk-SNARKs, and these claims are false.
A compromised MPC absolutely can wreck privacy; Zooko needs to correct this.
The problem is that the final public parameters can be constructed in such a way that they do not protect privacy. Doing this correctly is the responsibility of the MPC coordinator; the Zcash daemon is unable to verify that the parameters are correctly constructed.
I raised this issue months ago and nothing was done. In fact, as of writing it's not possible to verify the MPC correctly generated public parameters as the necessary files are missing; a GitHub issue for this problem has been open for six months: github.com/zcash/mpc/issu…
Not the only trusted setup related issue that's been ignored by the Zcash team: the build process broke a month after the ceremony, and Zcash has been ignoring patches to fix even these basic issues.
Highly suspicious they have zero interest in people auditing the trusted setup.
Highly suspicious they have zero interest in people auditing the trusted setup.
Zooko and others need to correct these false statements, fix the trusted setup auditing issues, and apologize.
With Zooko is paid about $250k/month directly from the ZEC block rewards, standards for ethical conduct around accurate disclosures are high.
With Zooko is paid about $250k/month directly from the ZEC block rewards, standards for ethical conduct around accurate disclosures are high.
