Rosario Gennaro
More info
- Affiliation
- IBM Research, City College of New York
- Known for
- Threshold ECDSA, GGPR (the basis of zk-SNARKs)
Cryptographer whose work on threshold signatures and quadratic arithmetic programs sits underneath both crypto wallets and zk-SNARKs.
In 2013, with Craig Gentry, Bryan Parno and Mariana Raykova, he published the construction usually called GGPR: a computation is rewritten as polynomial constraints, so a short proof is enough to convince someone it was carried out correctly. It became the foundation for Pinocchio and most of the zk-SNARKs that followed.
The Gennaro–Goldfeder protocol for threshold ECDSA arrived in 2018, letting several parties sign jointly without any of them ever seeing the whole key. It is widely used in custody setups for bitcoin. He has also written standard references on distributed key generation.