Bonus ZK Hack Wrap with Kobi!

Transcript

so as i mentioned at the end of last week's episode focused on the zk hack events there's no full episode this week but i had very much wanted to bring on kobe who was one of the co-creators of the zk hack but who wasn't able to make that episode i really wanted to do a bonus interview with him he's so key to this effort so i'm very happy to have kobe on the show with me today hey kobe hello so i'm very excited to chat with you about what went down on ck hack and what we have planned for the new year but before we go into that um i did want to give some sense of how folks who are maybe new to the podcast joining for the first time how they can already get involved in the zk community

the community that's kind of found formed around this podcast so on the website on the xeroknowledge.fm website you can see a number of links to different places you can check out things like the zk jobs board which is where teams in the space who are recruiting are actually posting their jobs so it's not zk jobs like working for the podcast although i might have one or two there it's really focused on you know the the teams that are building zero knowledge tech and they're looking for new people to work for them so if you're in the market for a new job in the new year please do check out the zk jobs board i also want to highlight the community board so this is a forum it's had a little bit of activity in the last few

months but i would love to see it grow in the coming year so this is a great place to ask questions to post new research to get feedback basically from experts uh we are modeling it a little bit after eath research so if you're familiar with that platform this is one that's focused very very much on zero knowledge tech and so i hope to see you there and there is also the telegram group and the zk telegram group is quite a large telegram group but lately it's been awesome there have been fantastic conversations going about like the nitty gritty of zk protocol design it's also a great place if you want to find out about events around the podcast stuff like that so i'll add links to all of these things in the show

notes i hope you'll check them out and without further ado i think we can now jump into the zk hack bonus but now let's talk to kobe kobe um how have you been i've i've been good uh it was uh nice to to take some time off um and uh yeah i hope you have the nice time in the holidays as well trying struggling to take vacation but trying i feel like right now there's so much going on that i'm having a really hard time stopping like just putting down the twitter stopping the emails like don't answer the telegram messages so yeah yeah there's just not too much

too much to read on and too many interesting things to follow up totally but let's talk about zk hack you weren't on the episode that we did where we did talk to some researchers and developers and the builders and some of the organizers and if if the listeners haven't heard that please do check it out but kobe what was your take on zk hack like it's over we we can now do a bit of a retrospective how do you feel about it i think it was amazing i i'm really really satisfied with the result and all the activity and the people that participated in zk hack and it evolved into something better than i hoped initially when we

thought about it i will also share that i was also a bit nervous when we started it you know totally i wasn't sure if people would like the puzzles if there will be attraction around it and we'll get some good solutions but we did and we got really good feedback and people liked it we also learned a lot from people about what we should not do anymore but uh yeah all in all i'm really happy with what we we did there yeah i think i did mention this in our in the episode on zk hack but i should say like maybe to give some context ck hack was the seven week event

that we ran in from like end of october till the beginning of december and it was like seven workshops six puzzles um that idea for the puzzles like was really co yours kobe it was like you remember we couldn't do the hackathon and you were like i have this idea had you been like what kind of spawned that idea what had you seen something like it or were you kind of like drawing on anything that you had done in the past yeah that's a great question this is something that i wanted to do for a while i i really like this method of learning through i guess through doing or but also through pushing the limits of systems

in the sense that uh you know when you read papers or look at documentation of projects it's all always written in a very positive context as in yes this is our project and this is our protocol and we got it right the first time we made it amazing but that's that's usually not what happens usually you try something and it fails and you find you find a problem with it you find an issue that breaks the whole protocol and it's not sound and you try something else and that also fails and it takes a lot of time to get something right and there is a lot of know-how

into how not to build things that is sometimes lost when you read things in a positive context so i feel that i also learn a lot better when i try to push the limits of systems so if you know i'm reading python recommendation and follow the tutorial that's nice but then if i also try to do some weird things like importing things yeah importing things i shouldn't do or replace packages in the package registry where this is not really what you should do

but it causes something interesting to happen then you realize okay now i understand how the normal flow works better because i try to learn around it and try to do things that it can't so you learn about yeah exactly like you learn about something through what it cannot do do you feel like by doing that you sort of learn the shape of the thing like you learn sort of the the lane that that they've chosen you learn a little bit more of the context of how this thing is working than if you were just well i mean i guess you just follow documentation you don't actually always know how it works you're just sort of like i can follow these instructions and it works

yeah i think that's a really good way to look at it like you learn you learn the shape or like if you're working in a forest if you go through this path that everybody walks on then you see some of the forest but if you go around into some other paths or some unfrozen pets then you you can see a lot of other interesting things and see why people didn't walk there you know you might see some bad things maybe some wolves i don't know tell me a little bit about what it was like kind of interacting with the builders what we focused on what susanna tanya and i focused on was much more of the events planning and organization

um doing the week to week doing some of the marketing but on the puzzle front that was really kind of your you were leading that so what was it like working with teams to build this thing so i had a really good experience working with the teams from anoma and elio some of the people i i knew better from the past but some of them i got to know better just now and all of them were really really good at what they do and but also very creative in the sense that you know we came with some ideas to them we told them we think that these problems or these exploits would be cool to talk about and some of them gave counter ideas like

yeah this is too easy this is too hard or maybe we should look at that because this is a core component in another protocol and i really enjoyed this interaction because it also led to some new ideas and it wasn't just led by us in some sense um and besides that i felt that um the builders gave their best effort into doing integrating good puzzles and making sure that and the puzzles are interesting and uh you know coming up with hints and coming up with background material and in general i i i am happy to have done this with them

now what about the hackers themselves so one of the chats in the zk hack discords is all focused on the puzzles so yeah what was like what was that like did you did you know most of the hackers beforehand did you find did you meet some new hackers through that how was that to my surprise or to my pleasant surprise i met a lot of new people so we did see some people that we know but a lot of the people were people that i may be encountered by name before or people that i haven't even encountered before and some of them are people that don't for example have a

strong public person on twitter or something like that but they're excellent at what they do some of them you know these these people have managed to solve puzzles in like 30 minutes or 40 minutes yeah whereas others took like a few days or the full week yeah so in the end a lot of them also asked good questions like they they either approached me and asked good questions about the puzzles or they even somehow try to help each other without revealing too much through the discord channels and

it was really interesting to see the the hackers that i didn't know before managing to to do to tackle these complex puzzles in in different ways and also writing them about them in a way that shows a deep understanding of the topic even though you know they might have just learned deeply about them only recently so you just get to know a lot of smart people that are really interested in getting into this and knowing more about these topics and

this gave them a chance or the excuse to do it i guess so cool do you feel like i mean this this idea of learning through hacking and kind of bringing together this international community of new researchers and hackers and cryptographers folks that maybe hadn't been as like visible to us and i think we we will be talking about this but like it seems like a really cool start to like a way to learn in the in the modern world like not the usual path to learning but doesn't it sort of capture or does it sort of do those things that traditional institutions do anyway just in this like very online

very sprint like it's like do you think of the puzzles almost like tests where they like the quizzes so someone actually told me oh i get paid to do homework problems so i found that funny but yeah i think you you might have a good point that this sometimes is similar to what you would see as a homework problem in university but in in a different sense if we talk about inspiration of where we got inspiration for puzzles is if you look at things like ctfs which are very different in nature but also

focus on hacking and when exploiting systems but more focused on like flows in systems and there is a competition of who gets to to their target first and but there are also other efforts that concentrate on for example hexane solidity or hex cnc and what i felt is that there wasn't something that focuses on advanced cryptography or this whole zero knowledge proof ecosystem while there are many protocols that exist there and that's that's what i wanted to

expose more because a lot more people got into this space especially the last year and i think it is a very fun way to get into it and i guess with all these new people joining though they may not have the background they may not have been in the in the industry while some of the previous hacks that did happen in the real world actually happened so this was also like this was an opportunity to kind of showcase what could happen or what has happened in the wild for those who maybe weren't because like i think it's very different when you're when you're in the moment when it happens and you see the impact and you see you feel the drama of like

people freaking out versus you know seeing it as like a in an article that something happened three years ago it's a very different experience i think this in a way tries to recreate that though where it's like you're gonna you're gonna break it you're gonna find the mystery like you're gonna break it and this is what it means yeah exactly and you know even if you were in the moment then even if you didn't try to hack anyone or you maybe try to look at it or try to to reverse engineer it and you're right it felt more exciting when you were there but if it was three years ago then it's not as fun reading an article about

it so you gotta do it you gotta try doing it yourself and it's harder without some hook to get into it yeah were all the puzzles actually based on previous like existing um actually so were all of the puzzles based on actual events like actual hacks in the wild or were some more constructed by the teams so initially we did want to base them all on hacks that happen in the wild and but it didn't seem extremely possible to make that happen and still make some good amount of puzzles that could be

sold in a reasonable time so we mainly took snippets out of things that did happen so either either problems that we've seen in production and so for example the zika bug that's one problem that actually happened and but problems that we've seen in protocols they didn't go in production yet but we've stopped the exploit before let's say like we've alerted them like as a community i mean not specifically me yeah um so for example the the first one the this bls paterson puzzle is something that we've seen something that was going

to go into production after some time probably and it's it's a good way to see why it shouldn't go because it's a very tricky and subtle one but yeah i think other puzzles for example teach you about core components of a protocol so [Music] the puzzle about the blinding polynomials was something that helps you understand how to achieve zero knowledge in plonk and more correctly why you take this polynomial with this degree rather than something lower or higher because maybe it's not as clear i'm not

sure it's super clear from the paper why it's that and you know people that know these techniques of common commitments and related techniques then they know why it matters and why this degree not another but we really wanted to highlight this understanding but yeah i think uh the other puzzles were more free-form and more general problems that exist uh out there but not specifically alluding to a concrete event that happened do you think you're do you think this is

sort of training or could be a training ground for like future auditors because it's like this is what that is what the auditors are doing a lot of the time right yeah it might be like i don't think it's only for auditors but auditors could definitely be a target but i think it could be some training course that every person that goes into zk or advanced cryptography could go through like it shouldn't be that hard like you could spend a few days or a week or something and solve the puzzles and gain a deeper understanding in a way that's fun i guess um yeah and you know seeing similar efforts that made this into a community effort that

where you have a bunch of exercises and you know i refer people to those things when they want to learn about solidity for example so yeah i think it could definitely grow into something like that cool wait learn about solidity no i mean not for our case but when like there is the ethernet thing that's what i meant okay so now let's chat about what the future of zk hack holds we wrapped up v1 of zk hack i'm going to call it that v1 zk hack one i don't know we we wrapped up the first one the first edition on december 7th and

yeah i think even before we wrapped up we had realized that there was something really valuable here and something we wanted to continue and so yeah coming up in the new year we have the plan to do a zika hack mini the dates are march 1st to march 16th right now tentative could change again it's online so it really doesn't matter what the state of the world is we can hopefully still do it as long as we have the internet um so yeah we're gonna do another zika hack mini and it's gonna be shorter this time we're gonna try to like make it yeah like around two weeks a little bit more condensed um but i'm very excited about that in the zika hack mini future and i know kobe we haven't really dug into planning

it but what would you love to see in that next edition what could we do what could be different or better or like an add-on do you have any ideas yet um that's a good question i think maybe what i would like to see more is some puzzles around zk because although you know this is dk hat we've mostly had process around other aspects of advanced cryptography so maybe if we try to take on more aspects in that in that area that would be fun and and i think a lot of people are interested in that so it could be really cool and what i was

what i was thinking would be really cool though is like i know that in various teams oh actually first of all there's the the builder teams didn't get to actually participate as hackers this past time and i want to give them the opportunity because it's like two ilionoma like awesome teams full of cr like fantastic cryptographers who were disbarred from competing because they had built it so they were like not allowed to do it but i know that they would potentially want to do it and i would like to kind of encourage more auditors more of the folks who maybe were aware of it from the sidelines um now that now that they're out there now that you can actually check out what it is what a puzzle is and what the solutions look like i hope that more people will also

join in like folks that are working in a lot of these a lot of the companies in the space who maybe thought this wasn't for them um i'd like to see them give it a shot too same i think that's a that could be cool yeah and then yeah the generally something that i want to i kind of want to share i think we kind of want to share about ck hack is like zk hack is not meant to end with this event it's not meant to only be you know on like it's not only meant to be an entity that exists when these events are happening we want it to become much more of a continuous platform a place where people can actually get deeper zk info

i feel like the podcast the zero knowledge podcast is quite broad i also talk about all sorts of things that are not zk related on this show but zk hack is much much more focused in on the technology and the engineering that go into the zero knowledge platforms and the tools that exist and so it's a really really good place for people who want to jump in academically who want to work in it who want to you know get their hands dirty who want to build stuff who want to start companies around these topics but they want to explore a use case this i think is the right it could be a really great way it could be a really great starting point for you um come to the zk hack events but also start you know

like meet some of the folks who are in the in the discord as well yeah and uh one cool thing that we've seen in the discord is study group naturally forming totally yeah we'd love to see more of that too if there are other resources that people would like to explore with others zika hack is definitely going to be much more of a like an open space it's it's i'd like to find lots of mods and community leads to actually start building up more stuff in there so actually if there's anyone out there who is interested in potentially participating as a mod or being part of building up this community running a study club or study group of your own um yeah do get in touch you can find us in

that discord and the link will be in the show notes yeah i will even one up that that if you want to contribute in some way in building some technical materials or building puzzles i think that would also be very welcome so yeah please reach out to us nice yeah and then i guess that sort of concludes the year this is uh this has been a really crazy fun wild year for ck especially the last like six months i guess um yeah what are you looking forward to kobe in the new year yeah i i think i'm looking forward to seeing [Music] how general purpose

zkl2's evolve i think that's an interesting space that's becoming more production ready only recently and we've seen that with a few different platforms like stock managing and others it's still very in its early days there's a lot to do it's all somewhat or at least in part centralized and it's going to evolve greatly it's not going to stay as it is today there's going to be more traction there and i think also people are going to realize that you don't really just have to clone what you do on l1

you can do new things that were insanely expensive on l1 not only terribly expensive but insanely expensive as well that you can now do so i'm looking forward to see all of these things as they apply to [Music] defy or games or even you know just other kinds of smart contracts or platforms but this is something that i'm really looking forward to see cool so next week i have a full episode with uh james tarroon josh cincinnati and guillermo where we're doing like predictions

um but thanks i'm so glad i got to hear a little bit of your predictions as well kobe too to bring to the table well hopes yeah wishes um but yeah thanks for coming on again and thanks again for doing zk hack together and i feel like we have lots of zk hack work ahead of us i shouldn't say that we have a lot of zika hack fun ahead of us yes and work but fun i'm excited for it and i do hope people you know who are listening to this have a look at it get to know it kind of join us and hopefully we'll see you at those events yeah i'm really looking forward to it cool okay so i guess that wraps up the year thanks again kobe

thank you and to our listeners thanks for listening happy new year happy new year cool