TCS+ talk *this week*: Wednesday, April 8, Rahul Ilango, MIT
Clement Canonne
This is a reminder that the next TCS+ talk is taking place this week, Wednesday, April 8th at 1:00 PM Eastern Time (10:00 AM Pacific Time, 19:00 Central European Time, 17:00 UTC). The speakers' slides will be made available at https://sites.google.com/view/tcsplus/welcome/past-talks after the talk.
If you’d like to join the Zoom talk, please sign up using the form at https://sites.google.com/view/tcsplus/welcome/next-tcs-talk. The talk will also be recorded and posted shortly afterwards on our YouTube channel, here: http://www.youtube.com/user/TCSplusSeminars.
Hoping to see you all there,
The organizers
-------------------------------
Speaker: Rahul Ilango (MIT)
Title: Gödel in Cryptography: Zero-Knowledge Proofs With No Interaction, No Setup, and Perfect Soundness
Abstract: Gödel showed that there are true but unprovable statements. This was bad news for Hilbert, who hoped that every true statement was provable. In this talk, I’ll describe why Gödel’s result is, in fact, good news for cryptography.
Specifically, Gödel’s result allows for the following strange scenario: a cryptographic system S is insecure, but it is impossible to prove that S is insecure. As I will explain, in this scenario (defined carefully), S is secure for nearly all practical purposes.
Leveraging this idea, we effectively construct — under longstanding assumptions — a classically-impossible cryptographic dream object: “zero-knowledge proofs for NP with no interaction, no setup, and perfect soundness” (I won’t assume you know what this means!). As an application, our result lets one give an ordinary mathematical proof that a Sudoku puzzle is solvable without revealing how to solve it. Previously, it was not known how to do this.
Paper link: https://eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2025/095/
Clement Canonne
The link for tomorrow's TCS+ talk has been posted: you will be able to join tomorrow (Wednesday), starting at 12:50pm ET: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/98954371813?pwd=V1hxN2Nrc2c5OEJFSWRqS29JeWM1dz09
(you will need to be logged in on Zoom to join: a free account suffices)
Best,
-- Clément, on behalf of the TCS+ team
________________________________________
From: 'Clement Canonne' via TCS+ <tcsplus_...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, April 6, 2026 6:45 AM
To: TCS+ Announcement Mailing List
Subject: TCS+ talk *this week*: Wednesday, April 8, Rahul Ilango, MIT
Hello everyone,
This is a reminder that the next TCS+ talk is taking place this week, Wednesday, April 8th at 1:00 PM Eastern Time (10:00 AM Pacific Time, 19:00 Central European Time, 17:00 UTC). The speakers' slides will be made available at https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/kFppCK1DvKTBM9vn2TMfLT5Ydoc?domain=sites.google.com after the talk.
If you’d like to join the Zoom talk, please sign up using the form at https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/Soe_CL7EwMfmwXp1RSqh2Ty0EX-?domain=sites.google.com. The talk will also be recorded and posted shortly afterwards on our YouTube channel, here: https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/_nXnCMwGxOtRk90ZqTJiXT8epAg?domain=youtube.com.
Hoping to see you all there,
The organizers
-------------------------------
Speaker: Rahul Ilango (MIT)
Title: Gödel in Cryptography: Zero-Knowledge Proofs With No Interaction, No Setup, and Perfect Soundness
Abstract: Gödel showed that there are true but unprovable statements. This was bad news for Hilbert, who hoped that every true statement was provable. In this talk, I’ll describe why Gödel’s result is, in fact, good news for cryptography.
Specifically, Gödel’s result allows for the following strange scenario: a cryptographic system S is insecure, but it is impossible to prove that S is insecure. As I will explain, in this scenario (defined carefully), S is secure for nearly all practical purposes.
Leveraging this idea, we effectively construct — under longstanding assumptions — a classically-impossible cryptographic dream object: “zero-knowledge proofs for NP with no interaction, no setup, and perfect soundness” (I won’t assume you know what this means!). As an application, our result lets one give an ordinary mathematical proof that a Sudoku puzzle is solvable without revealing how to solve it. Previously, it was not known how to do this.
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