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ASTARISC

crypto means cryptography

Research

High-quality research is the engine of cryptographic engineering. We specialize in moving from abstract mathematical foundations to concretely efficient, provably secure implementations.

Design of Symmetric-Key Primitives for Advanced Cryptographic Protocols

Abdelrahaman Aly, Tomer Ashur, Eli Ben-Sasson, Siemen Dhooghe, Alan Szepieniec

The Work: This paper identifies the fundamental disconnect between traditional symmetric cryptography and the requirements of modern proof systems. It introduces the Marvellous design strategy—a framework for creating ciphers and hash functions (such as Rescue) natively over large finite fields to minimize arithmetization costs.

The Impact: Since 2019, this work has become a cornerstone of arithmetization-oriented programming. By shifting the efficiency metric from CPU-cycle counts to constraint count, it paved the way for a new generation of ZK-friendly primitives. These principles are now implemented in production-grade ZK-rollups and privacy protocols worldwide.

Transparent SNARKs from DARK Compilers

Benedikt Bünz, Ben Fisch, Alan Szepieniec

The Work: Published at EUROCRYPT 2020, this research introduced DARK (Diophantine Arguments of Knowledge), a polynomial commitment scheme leveraging groups of unknown order. Leveraging this polynomial commitment scheme, it proceeds to build a "compiler" that transforms any Polynomial Interactive Oracle Proof (IOP) into a fully succinct, transparent SNARK.

The Impact: This work provided the architectural blueprint for modern proof systems by decoupling polynomial relations from their cryptographic enforcement. While other concurrent works identified similar separations, the "Polynomial IOP" terminology and framework from this paper became the industry standard. It furthermore proposed Supersonic, the first transparent SNARK to achieve both practical prover times and asymptotically logarithmic proof sizes, and remains a foundational text for modular proof system design.

Anatomy of a STARK

Alan Szepieniec

The Work: A foundational pedagogical deconstruction of the STARK (Scalable Transparent Argument of Knowledge) protocol. This series of tutorials translates abstract academic theory into concrete, implementable logic, covering everything from Arithmetization to the FRI protocol.

The Impact: This work has become the de facto entry point for engineers and researchers entering the Zero-Knowledge space. It is frequently cited in the documentation of major ZK-VMs and remains the industry-standard reference for a first-principles understanding of hash-based proof systems.

Selected Bibliography