Using Formal Verification on ZK Systems with Jon Stephens

This week Anna Rose chats with Jon Stephens, Computer Science Ph.D. student in the UToPiA group at UT Austin and co-founder of Veridise. Veridise is a blockchain auditing firm that audits smart contracts and ZK systems. They discuss what led Jon to work on system security, what tools are available to test the security of ZK systems and the process of performing formal verification on ZK systems. They also cover general ZK security, why this topic matters and ways we can incentivise ethical disclosures when bugs and vulnerabilities are found.

Additional reading for this week's episode;

• SmartPulse: Automated Checking of Temporal Properties in Smart Contracts by Stephens, Ferles, Mariano, Lahiri, and Dillig
• Certifying Zero-Knowledge Circuits with Refinement Types by J. Liu, Kretz, H. Liu, Tan, Wang, Sun, Pearson, Miltner, Dillig, and Feng
• Practical Security Analysis of Zero-Knowledge Proof Circuits by Wen, Stephens, Chen, Ferles, Pailoor, Charbonnet, Dillig and Feng
• Episode 67: Formal Verification with Martin Lundfall
• Episode 70: Digging into DAI with Rune Christensen from Maker
• Episode 255: Verifying Consensus On-Chain with Succinct
• Boogie: An Intermediate Verification Language
• Circom-lib
• How Coders Hacked Back to ‘Rescue’ $208 Million in Ethereum

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