Collaborative zkSNARKs: Scalability and Malicious Security

Title of the Talk: Collaborative zkSNARKs: Scalability and Malicious Security
Speaker: Sruthi Sekar
Host Faculty: Dr.Subrahmanyam Kalyanasundaram
Date: Friday, 13th February 2026
Time: 4:00 pm
Venue: CS-Seminar Hall 1

Abstract:
Collaborative zk-SNARKs, introduced by Ozdemir and Boneh (USENIX’22), are a multi-prover extension of zk-SNARKs in which multiple mutually distrustful provers, each holding a private input, jointly generate a zk-SNARK that attests to the correctness of a computation over their collective secrets.

A sequence of recent works has proposed efficient constructions of collaborative zk-SNARKs following a common template: designing secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocols that emulate the behavior of a zk-SNARK prover, while avoiding non-black-box use of cryptographic primitives. In this talk, I will survey this framework and highlight some specific results addressing scalability and malicious security (based on recent works at USENIX’23 and CRYPTO’25).

Bio:
Sruthi Sekar is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Her research interests span both theoretical and applied cryptography, as well as theoretical computer science more broadly. Prior to this, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her Master’s and PhD degrees from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Her PhD thesis received an Honorable Mention at the ACM India Doctoral Dissertation Award 2022. She was also awarded the TCS PhD Fellowship and received the Prof. P. L. Bhatnagar Medal (Gold Medal for her Master’s degree) from IISc.