Research priorities

If you’re new to the concept of “programmable cryptography”, you should first read the Programmable Cryptography blog post. You can also see the Three Easy Pieces novella as an introduction to the mathematical details that help realize the visions we described in our blog post.

At 0xPARC, our research agenda is driven by future applications. Here are some directions we’re thinking about.

• Zero-knowledge proofs and the Universal Protocol. Leverage zero-knowledge proofs to perform arbitrary transformations on cryptographically authenticated data – with remarkable implications for privacy and data ownership.

• Multiparty computation, fully homomorphic encryption and hallucinated servers. Allow a group of people to spin up a virtual server, whose internal state none of them can access.

• Obfuscation, functional encryption and cryptomata. Build autonomous cryptographic agents – or at least improve the functionality of hallucinated servers.