PhD @ University of Cambridge, previously at NYU

Cambridge, UK
Joined June 2018
“Enjoy the small things.” Good reminder.
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Hossein Hafezi retweeted
Scaling Trust is announcing its first batch of Creators: teams building open-source infra and performing fundamental research for agents to coordinate securely, across digital and physical worlds. I gave Opus 5.5 our creator release doc and, after a few passes, it made this 👇 Meet the teams → scalingtrust.org.uk/projects We fund new teams on a rolling basis; next deadline 31 Oct → aria.org.uk/opportunity-spac…
With the capability to coordinate securely, AI agents could act reliably on our behalf, unlocking a whole range of economically and socially valuable interactions that were previously inaccessible. Meet the first cohort of teams we’re backing to make it happen, as part of our £50m Scaling Trust programme. 👇 link.aria.org.uk/ST-Creators
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Hossein Hafezi retweeted
🔥🔥🔥 Get ready for #ZKProof 2026! Speaker: Hossein Hafezi @RandomString00 from @nyuniversity Join us in Rome, May 9-10 to discuss the latest in ZKPs and applications, the Quantum threat, formal verification in ArkLib, IOPs & more. For more details - link in the first comment
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Hossein Hafezi retweeted
Announcing the preliminary program for Cedarcrypt — our inaugural applied cryptography summer school and conference, July 13–16, 2026 at the American University of Beirut - Mediterraneo in Paphos, Cyprus! We've put together a program we're genuinely proud of — a pedagogical progression from accessible foundations to state-of-the-art constructions, featuring lectures, hands-on workshops, and research talks from leading voices across academia and industry. The program spans everything from accessible foundations to cutting-edge research: Bart Preneel (KU Leuven) opens with a keynote, followed by deep dives into FHE with Emad Heydari Beni (Nokia Bell Labs), state-of-the-art hash-based SNARKs with Giacomo Fenzi (EPFL), and Zero-Knowledge Proofs with Tarek Galal (TU Berlin). Practitioners will hear from Zeke Hunter-Green how The Guardian built their anonymous whistleblowing system (CoverDrop + MLS), and a host of other guest speakers who will help attendees learn post-quantum migration strategies across lattices, isogenies, and codes, and get hands-on with threshold signing, MPC engineering, and constant-time programming — all in four days on the Mediterranean coast. Organized in collaboration with the IACR, and hosted on Cyprus's Mediterranean coast — a UNESCO World Heritage city where you can step from a workshop on threshold signing straight to a seaside taverna. Thanks to our generous sponsors — Electi, PQShield, Symbolic Software, Zama, and several anonymous donors — we're offering FULL SCHOLARSHIPS (travel + lodging) to students and early-career researchers, awarded on a rolling basis until funds are exhausted. Graduate students, early-career researchers, and practitioners in applied cryptography: we built this for you! Join us this July in sunny Paphos! Let's make this an inaugural event to remember!
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Hossein Hafezi retweeted
As a recent PC chair, I can confirm that this will be a real problem in a few months.
We may be entering a death spiral in academic peer review. xitter.cf/lzhou1110/status/20320…
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Kinda reflects the state of the job market everywhere:
350 applicants for a PhD position in theoretical physics. It grows every time. Not just in Leuven, but everywhere.
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Hi everyone! 👋 We're running a brief anonymous survey on how cryptographers and security researchers view the potential quantum threat, for a research project. We'd really appreciate your input! forms.gle/6wDL65dRPb5JSuwg6 Thanks so much! 🙏
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1) We present the first truly private, single-server zkSNARK delegation scheme for well-known group-based zkSNARKs such as Groth16, Plonk, and Nova. Our core idea is to delegate the prover’s most expensive computation—namely, the MSM—to a single server.
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2) While we maintain strong privacy guarantees. Unlike all prior works (including multi-server settings), our proofs are unlinkable to the client–server interaction, making the scheme suitable for privacy-critical applications, such as Zcash.
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This new paper looks very cool. I was never a fan of delegation schemes requiring you to secret share the witness between servers. Here there is a nice idea of how to privatey delegate an MSM to one server using the learning parity with noise assumption. eprint.iacr.org/2025/2113.pd…
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(1) In this paper, we provide a unified framework for lookup table arguments, considering some overlooked aspects such as projectiveness and different modes of compatibility with proof systems.
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(3) We point out some important gaps, such as a lack of a lookup scheme with moderate preprocessing and efficiency for unstructured tables, etc.
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(4) We also provide an excellent survey of existing techniques categorised into four families: (i) multi-hash based ones, (ii) logup based (iii) subvector extraction (matrix-vector) and (iv) polynomial processing.
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The long-standing challenge of making key transparency both self-auditable and practical has been solved! IronDict scales to billions of users, making it suitable for platforms like iMessage, WhatsApp, and Signal.
Check out our new paper: IronDict — Transparent Dictionaries from Polynomial Commitments 🔑 1B entries audited in 35ms with an 8KB proof 📉 300× faster auditer, 150,000× smaller proofs than @WhatsApp's AKD 📄 eprint.iacr.org/2025/1580 💻 github.com/alireza-shirzad/I…
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Big shout-out to my amazing coauthors @benediktbuenz, @alrshirzad, and @josephbonneau.
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Claim: gpt-5-pro can prove new interesting mathematics. Proof: I took a convex optimization paper with a clean open problem in it and asked gpt-5-pro to work on it. It proved a better bound than what is in the paper, and I checked the proof it's correct. Details below.
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Hossein Hafezi retweeted
We are recruiting.
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Hossein Hafezi retweeted
Learn about KZH-fold: a new accumulation/folding scheme! 2000x reduction in communication and 50x faster decider time compared to Nova for 2000 Poseidon hashes, at a cost of 3x the prover time. Hossein Hafezi presented this standout collab from the Ethereum Foundation & NYU! youtube.com/watch?v=vnz05W3t…
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Recently, I presented our recent work, "KZH-Fold: Accountable Voting from Sublinear Accumulation" (joint work with @benediktbuenz @arantxazapico and @asn_d6) at Stanford Security Seminar, you may find the video here: crypto.stanford.edu/seclab/s…
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