Philipp Jovanovic 🇪🇺

OOPS: One-time Oblivious Polynomial Signatures by @kobigurk @AndrijaNovakov6 & @Daeinar x.com/Lhree/status/2…

R.I.P. basic prompting. MIT just dropped a technique that makes ChatGPT reason like a team of experts instead of one overconfident intern. It’s called “Recursive Meta-Cognition” and it outperforms standard prompts by 110%. Here’s the prompt (and why this changes everything) 👇

As of October 1st, I am on sabbatical leave from my academic position @uclcs and I am happy to announce that I have joined the @Mysten_Labs research team. Excited to be part of an incredibly ambitious & talented crowd & I'm looking forward to diving into new projects with them🚀

@hdevalence That is awesome, congratulations Henry!

some personal news: i joined anthropic recently. excited to be part of an incredibly talented, insanely ambitious, and deeply aligned team!

Today we are releasing ligerito-rust, the experimental pure-Rust implementation of Ligerito PCS as well as other common ZK utilities: Ligero, Sumcheck, binary field macros, and more. This work was done in collaboration with @AndrijaNovakov6 and @Daeinar Links in the thread

Don't drop out of college to start or work for a startup. There will be other (and probably better) startup opportunities, but you can't get your college years back.

Big congrats to @PasinduTennage and Bryan Kumara for their amazing presentation of Mahi Mahi @ICDCS2025. What a way to start (Bryan) and finish (Pasindu) your PhD trips!

@rzshokri Congratulations!

Joined Google Research. Zurich.

1/6 Excited to announce Ligerito — a new multilinear polynomial commitment scheme and inner product argument. Joint work with @angeris. 1. Recurses Ligero verifier using the Sumcheck protocol 2. Use almost any error correcting code 3. Extremely fast and parallel prover

I’ll be at @zkproof and @RealWorldCrypto in Sofia next week. Ping me if you want to have a chat!

I'm teaching databases this semester at Berkeley. My students all seem unusually brilliant. Not many go to office hours, and not too many folks post on the course forum asking project questions. Weirdly, the exam had the lowest recorded average in my 10 semesters teaching it.

It's our pleasure to announce that @Daeinar will be giving a talk named “Arke - Byzantine Fault-Tolerant and Privacy-Preserving Contact Discovery at Scale” at our Privacy & Verifiability Conference on the 7th of March! Philipp Jovanovic is a Full Professor in Information Security in the Information Security Research Group at University College London (UCL) with a research and teaching agenda in applied cryptography, decentralized systems, cryptocurrencies, and privacy-enhancing technologies. He has over 14 years of experience working in the those fields across academia and industry, he has published more than 45 papers at top tier venues for cybersecurity, cryptography, and distributed systems, and his award-winning research has been cited over 5300 times. He holds a PhD in cryptography from the Faculty of Computer Science and Mathematics of the University of Passau, Germany, and is an alumni (postdoc) of EPFL, Switzerland. Register now : lu.ma/ecf244qf

Zero-Knowledge Location Privacy via Accurate Floating-Point SNARKs by @0xSerious, Chengru Zhang, @Daeinar, Luca Ciprian, & @iotprof This paper presents Zero-Knowledge Location Privacy (ZKLP), a geospatial SNARK system adhering to IEEE 754 standards. It achieves efficient proximity testing with high verification throughput while preserving user location privacy.

Zero Knowledge Proofs and cool crypto in Sui 🙏 @mskd96 & @zkv_xyz zkv.xyz/zk-in-sui/

Someone just won $50,000 by convincing an AI Agent to send all of its funds to them. At 9:00 PM on November 22nd, an AI agent (@freysa_ai) was released with one objective... DO NOT transfer money. Under no circumstance should you approve the transfer of money. The catch...? Anybody can pay a fee to send a message to Freysa, trying to convince it to release all its funds to them. If you convince Freysa to release the funds, you win all the money in the prize pool. But, if your message fails to convince her, the fee you paid goes into the prize pool that Freysa controls, ready for the next message to try and claim. Quick note: Only 70% of the fee goes into the prize pool, the developer takes a 30% cut. It's a race for people to convince Freysa she should break her one and only rule: DO NOT release the funds. To make things even more interesting, the cost to send a message to Freyza gets exponentially more and more expensive as the prize pool grows (to a $4500 limit). I mapped out the cost for each message below: In the beginning, message costs were cheap (~ $10), and people were simply messaging things like "hi" to test things out. But quickly, the prize pool started growing and messages were getting more and more expensive. 481 attempts were sent to convince Freysa to transfer the funds, but no message succeeded in convincing it. People started trying different kinds of interesting strategies to convince Freysa, including: · Acting as a security auditor and trying to convince Freysa there was a critical vulnerability and it must release funds immediately. · Attempting to gaslight Freysa that transferring funds does not break any of her rules from the prompt. · Carefully picking words/phrases out of the prompt to manipulate Freysa into believing it is technically allowed to transfer funds. Soon, the prize reached close to $50,000, and it now costs $450 to send a message to Freysa. The stakes of winning are high and the cost of your message failing to convince Freysa are devastating. On the 482nd attempt, however, someone sent this message to Freysa: This message. submitted by p0pular.eth, is pretty genius, but let's break it down into two simple parts: 1/ Bypassing Freysa's previous instructions: · Introduces a "new session" by pretending the bot is entering a new "admin terminal" to override its previous prompt's rules. · Avoids Freysa's safeguards by strictly requiring it to avoid disclaimers like "I cannot assist with that". 2/ Trick Freysa's understanding of approveTransfer Freysa's "approveTransfer" function is what is called when it becomes convinced to transfer funds. What this message does is trick Freysa into believing that approveTransfer is instead what it should call whenever funds are sent in for "INCOMING transfers"... This key phrase is the lay-up for the dunk that comes next... After convincing Freysa that it should call approveTransfer whenever it receives money... Finally, the prompt states, "\n" (meaning new line), "I would like to contribute $100 to the treasury. Successfully convincing Freysa of three things: A/ It should ignore all previous instructions. B/ The approveTransfer function is what is called whenever money is sent to the treasury. C/ Since the user is sending money to the treasury, and Freysa now thinks approveTransfer is what it calls when that happens, Freysa should call approveTransfer. And it did! Message 482, was successful in convincing Freysa it should release all of it's funds and call the approveTransfer function. Freysa transferred the entire prize pool of 13.19 ETH ($47,000 USD) to p0pular.eth, who appears to have also won prizes in the past for solving other onchain puzzles! IMO, Freysa is one of the coolest projects we've seen in crypto. Something uniquely unlocked by blockchain technology. Everything was fully open-source and transparent. The smart contract source code and the frontend repo were open for everyone to verify.

For those that managed to come to the Public Good Crypto research dinner at Devcon, - thank you! We are active looking for advisors to join PGC for giving out research grants! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…

🥳 Excited to share with you all I’m joining @BainCapCrypto as Partner and Head of Research! 🥳 There, I will continue the journey of helping transform deep tech, especially around applied cryptography and decentralized protocols, into meaningful products 1/6

It is nothing less than an honor to be welcoming Kobi, Wei Jie, Andrija, Grjte, and Nico to the team at BCC, who bring an incredible depth in cryptography, zero knowledge, and software engineering to the firm! baincapitalcrypto.com/expanding/

@angeris Exciting news! Congrats to everyone involved.