announcement

Looking for an internship in 2025?

ZK/SEC February 25, 2025 1 min

Internships at zkSecurity

Looking for an internship in ZK, MPC, FHE, and post-quantum cryptography? Interested in working with AI, formal verification, and TEEs? We are always looking for talented peeps to join our team and do interesting research!

Here are some of the projects our previous interns have worked on:

The fast track to get an interview is to solve our zkBank challenge, but feel free to apply directly by submitting your resume to internships2025@zksecurity.xyz.

We are looking forward to hearing from you!

Keep reading

Latest

Fiat-Shamir Bugs: How One Missing Line Breaks a Proof System

This blog post looks at Fiat-Shamir from a practical security perspective: it explains why something that seems simple in theory can become surprisingly easy to get wrong. By using vulnerabilities found in real-world projects, we give developers and reviewers a better way to think about Fiat-Shamir when designing, implementing, and auditing proof systems.

Giap Vu, David Wong · September 19, 2026

Better Codes - and how they can be worse if you're not careful

An exploration of how an AI tried to work around a security feature to handle a theorem that was hard to prove.

Kobi Gurkan · September 14, 2026

The Year Finding and Exploiting Bugs Became Cheap, and What to Do About It

The economics of security have changed. AI has made finding and exploiting bugs cheaper, including in cryptographic and zero-knowledge code, while validation and remediation remain slow. Here is our view of what happened, what comes next, and how teams should change the way they secure their stack to defend against AI-assisted attackers.

Stefanos Chaliasos · September 07, 2026

Recommended

New Challenge Alert: Complete Both to Join zkSecurity

Think you have what it takes to join zkSecurity? We're raising the bar with a second challenge! Now candidates must complete both zkBank and our new Curve Machine challenge to prove their skills across the full spectrum of ZK security. Are you ready to take on both challenges?

ZK/SEC · December 01, 2025

A challenge on the Jolt zkVM

Last weekend, we had a blast crafting challenges for a CTF event at the MOCA Italian hacker camp. One cryptography challenge, "2+2=5," involved the Jolt zkVM and a RISC-V program. In this post, we share the ins and outs of the challenge, the clever use of a modified Jolt library, and how we managed to prove an invalid execution without triggering verification alarms. Get ready to dive into the world of Jolt and pick up some nifty insights on exploiting cryptographic systems like a true hacker.

Giorgio Dell'Immagine · September 24, 2024

Improving the Security of the Jolt zkVM

We recently explored a16z’s Jolt zkVM to bolster its security, discovering significant bugs in the process. Our findings revealed vulnerabilities that could allow malicious provers to forge proofs, highlighting the crucial role of manual reviews in catching these issues. Jolt, with its unique approach using the Lasso lookup technique, aims to improve prover efficiency and system scalability. With these bugs now fixed, this work underscores the importance of thorough audits in ensuring the reliability of advanced zkVM technology. Stay tuned as we continue to delve into zkVM security insights.

Suneal Gong, Imam Al-Fath · November 19, 2024

More to explore

WE-KZG: Encrypt to KZG.

Ever wondered if you could create a ciphertext that's only decrypted when a polynomial inside a commitment has a particular value? We’ve explored this notion using KZG commitments in our latest Asiacrypt 2024 paper. Dive into the elegant world of Witness Encryption and see how it can be applied in cool ways like Laconic Oblivious Transfer. This approach keeps things as efficient as regular KZG operations and might just spark some creative applications of your own! Curious to learn more? Let’s explore together!

Mathias Hall-Andersen · October 08, 2024

Clean: From Verified Circuits to Verified zkVMs

Clean, our circuit DSL, is growing toward verification of complex multi-AIR ensembles. We introduce channels as a way to model lookups, permutation arguments, and zkVM cross-table interactions, then explain how local gadget proofs can compose into global soundness theorems. Watch our talk from ZKProof 8 or read the post.

Gregor Mitscha-Baude · June 05, 2026

Encrypted Mempools: Security Beyond Encryption

Encrypted mempools are an emerging approach to reducing transaction-ordering MEV. They are not just normal mempools with encryption added on top: they introduce a new security boundary around the exact moment a transaction becomes plaintext. This post explains the security model, the core invariant, and the subtle failure modes protocol designers need to consider.

Suneal Gong · May 07, 2026