Pittsburgh, USA, December 6, 2024, Chainwire
Anaxi Labs, in collaboration with CyLab, Carnegie Mellon University's Cybersecurity and Privacy Research Institute, introduces a compiler framework for cryptography that solves the impasse. Building scalable applications with zero knowledge requires fundamental tradeoffs. The elusive trifecta of scalable, cryptographically secured, and decentralized applications has traditionally been considered impossible and a barrier to mass adoption.
A breakthrough in cryptography without trade-offs
blockchain has been hailed as the future of decentralized infrastructure, with Zero Knowledge (ZK) technology heralded as increasing Ethereum's security and scalability beyond 120 TPS. According to the team, ZK Proof development is complex and time-consuming, requiring thousands of hours across dozens of developers. Prioritizing the speed of proof generation also means manually designing protocols, which with hand coding and tens of thousands of lines of code introduces significant security vulnerabilities. This complicates the creation of security-sensitive decentralized applications and makes auditability and compliance a nightmare. All of this hinders widespread adoption in regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and AI.
A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University is working with the Anaxi Institute to overcome this tradeoff.
A recent paper from CMU shows an innovative way to directly compile and transform high-level software into the simpler form (low-level representation) required for the underlying proof system to work. All of this happens automatically, is repeatable, and auditable, eliminating manual effort and significantly improving performance while cryptographically ensuring process security. This work accomplishes this by analyzing high-level programs, dividing them into small indivisible units, and creating low-level representations from each unit that can be easily input into various proof systems.
“This idea of automatically dividing the computation into very specific chunks on behalf of the CPU is a new approach, and this is the first time someone has attempted this kind of approach that avoids the full program representation of the compiler. ,” said Riyad Waby, assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “We're very excited about this.” Unlocking new decentralized applications
The research and frameworks Anaxi Labs is building on will revolutionize the industry in Web3 and beyond. Traditional regulated finance enables real-time settlement of intrabank transfers, such as instant USD payments, improving performance while maintaining auditability. In the healthcare sector, amidst the challenges faced by 23andMe, secure and privacy-preserving encryption tools enabled by products being developed by Anaxi Labs will protect the rightful ownership of an individual's DNA while enabling valuable research. This guarantee addresses critical concerns and ensures the safe use of private genetic information. In the realm of enterprise AI and critical physical infrastructure, distributed solutions that require high availability and near-zero latency are becoming a reality, including rapid fine-tuning and inference across multiple data and compute power resources.
For now, products based on this research provide the most effective solution for Web3 companies grappling with the tradeoffs of scalability, security, and decentralization, and provide a new design paradigm for rollup and interoperability.
“This research, and the products we are building that incorporate it, will have a significant impact on many of today's critical industrial applications, such as ZK and EVM, which require secure solutions to huge performance overheads. and ultimately bring us to the doorstep of our crypto vision – ensuring decentralized consensus through real-time payments,” said Kate Shen, co-founder of Anaxi Labs. “We also like the fact that it's language and library agnostic, meaning that different projects can benefit from this without having to change their code. This eliminates today's static, monolithic approaches. In contrast, we were able to build an open and collaborative framework,” adds Shen. “This allows all developers to automatically select and combine the latest advances in proof systems such as lookups, coprocessors, and hardware acceleration to maximize performance gains for each compute board. ” Anaxi Labs and CyLab, innovative partnership
Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab is a center of cutting-edge research that serves as the foundation for zero-knowledge blockchain development. CyLab's notable faculty researchers include the esteemed Professor Brian Parno, a key contributor to the history of ZK, whose lab produced the widely cited Nova paper series, and who is committed to realizing the Ethereum Foundation's vision. They include assistant professor Riad Wabi, who discovered a new cryptographic technique. And most recently, there's the groundbreaking Jolt zkVM implementation by Andreessen Horowitz's crypto division, a16z crypto.
The findings described in this compiler framework are the result of the second research project born out of Anaxi Labs and CyLab's symbiotic partnership through the CMU Secure Blockchain Initiative. This partnership will allow CMU academics to collaborate and learn insights gleaned from the commercial deployment of blockchain research for both Web3 and Web 2.0 applications led by Anaxi Labs. This allows us to find commercial solutions to existing major problems with blockchain that fail to bridge the gap between the known benefits of blockchain technology and mass adoption. It also serves as a springboard for CMU students to begin their careers at Web3.
“The partnership between Anaxi Labs and CyLab increases the ability of CMU researchers to work on projects with direct real-world applications, ensuring the practical relevance and impact potential of their research.” said Michael Lisanti, senior director of partnerships at CyLab. About Anaxi Labs: https://www.anaxilabs.com/
To learn more about Anaxi Labs and CyLab's latest efforts, visit https://www.cylab.cmu.edu/.
For more information about the partnership between CyLab and Anaxi Labs, please visit https://www.cylab.cmu.edu/news/2024/07/17-anaxi-labs-strategic-partner.html
About Anakshi Institute
Anaxi Labs is a new kind of research and development lab that bridges the worlds of advanced academic theory and mass adoption. They are dedicated to producing original, cutting-edge research, building enterprise-grade, secure, scalable decentralized infrastructure, and powering the next generation of cryptographically decentralized applications.
Anaxi Labs works with the world's top minds in cryptographic research and world-class engineers with experience building and operating well-known products with hundreds of millions of users. They are an industry partner of top academic institutions in cryptography such as Carnegie Mellon University. Together, they are working to transform the future of the internet by unlocking the power of what science can do for people, society and the planet.
Website: https://www.anaxilabs.com/
About CyLabo
CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University is the university's security and privacy research institute. It brings together experts from all schools within the university, covering the fields of engineering, computer science, public policy, information systems, business, financial information risk management, humanities, and social sciences. Our mission is to foster, support, promote, and strengthen security and privacy collaborative research and education across departments, disciplines, and geographic boundaries, and to significantly impact research, education, public policy, and practice. is.
Website: https://www.cylab.cmu.edu/
Contact PRDaisy Leungdaisy@11.international
This article was originally published on Chainwire
