Student-led research collaborations in cryptography and distributed systems—focused on publishable results and mathematical guarantees.
Research wing established and 8 researchers initiated (WS 25/26). 2 collaborations launched: TUM Institute of Network Architectures and Services + zkSecurity.
Private Transactions / MEV Mitigation (TUM Institute of Network Architectures and Services)
Our TBC x TNAS collaboration has been focused around developing cryptographic protocols designed to keep transactions private, up and until their inclusion into the blockchain. These protocols are designed to mitigate adversarial financial/MEV attacks by both validators or external attackers. We started by analyzing the best performing protocols in academia, and found that UC Berkeley's bTPKE protocol performed the best out of all. We then worked on further enhancing this protocol and successfully achieved a 42x speed improvement end-to-end. Our current work lies in providing pen-and-paper mathematical bounds, proofs, and security guarantees for the performance of our new protocol HbTPKE, before sending our work to conferences/journals.
Team Members
zkVM for Industrial Control Systems
Our TBC x zkSecurity collaboration has been focused around developing a new kind of zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM), specifically designed for standardized logic that runs specifically in industrial control systems—i.e. factories with sensors that are processing and sending control signals to machines. We have discovered a way to enhance both the efficiency and security simultaneously of contemporary zkVM architectures, by removing RISC-V intermediate representations of incoming assembly instructions and customizing the machine's zero knowledge proof construction around the standardized set of industrial control logic instructions. Our current work lies in designing this new zkVM architecture, before instantiating it as an actual zkVM in the real world, and sending our work to top conferences and journals.
Team Members
Partner note: routed via Industry/External Affairs