I provide thesis topics for both bachelor's and master's level in cryptography.
I will be adding more example topics as time goes by. However, these are just meant to give some intuition of the type of topics I am interested in. You can always come to talk to me so we can come up with the best topic for you. Cryptography topics related to provable security, public key cryptography (signatures, public key encryption), zero-knowledge proofs, SNARKs, and idealized security models are all potential candidates.
Implementing ZK Proofs: We choose some zero-knowledge proof from scientific literature. You will implement and measure its performance (running time, proof size, memory requirement).
Attack against Fiat-Shamir: The Fiat-Shamir heuristic is a tool for making interactive zero-knowledge proofs non-interactive. In such a case, the prover has to send a single message to the verifier, without needing any further response. This is highly desired in many practical applications.
However, the Fiat-Shamir heuristic is only known to be secure in an idealized security model called the random oracle model. Some theoretical attacks have been known for a while, but more recently, Khovratovich, Rothblum, and Soukhanov discovered an attack against Fiat-Shamir heuristic in a practical real-world protocol.
The task is to write a summary of known attacks against the Fiat-Shamir heuristic (linked above) and to see if other real-world protocols are vulnerable.
Understanding folding schemes: Folding schemes like Nova, ProtoStar, LatticeFold are a new technique for constructing efficient proof systems. They are being actively studied in the blockchain industry and are a promising solution for scaling blockchains (see zk-rollup). A lot of these schemes have been proposed rapidly, with increasingly better efficiency properties. However, often, their security analysis has not been very thorough.
In this project, we will pick one of the folding schemes, and the student will write a summary of the scheme. As an additional contribution, we will try to analyze the security of the scheme.
Contact me at jannosiim@gmail.com or find me in room 3073 in Delta to discuss thesis topics.