Michele Orrù
I am an Associate Research Professor (on leave) at CNRS, specializing in cryptographic systems for privacy-preserving authentication.
Research
-
Anonymous credentials. I design methods for users to trust each other anonymously. Recent work includes μCMZ.
-
Zero-knowledge proofs. I work on the design, standardization, and deployment of proof systems and non-interactive arguments, including Gemini and Internet Drafts for Fiat–Shamir and Sigma Protocols.
-
Confidential transactions. In the past, I worked on the security foundations of Mimblewimble, a private cryptocurrency.
Projects
I built some cool privacy technologies.
-
GlobaLeaks [Le Monde] [National Geographic] [The Guardian]
Co-creator with Arturo Filastò, Claudio Agosti, Fabio Pietrosanti, Giovanni Pellerano.
An anonymous whistleblowing platform. For example, WildLeaks uses it to gather evidence of environmental crime. -
Encrypted Spaces [WIRED]
Co-creator with Trevor Perrin, Nora Trapp, Greg Zaverucha.
An open-source architecture for end-to-end encrypted collaborative applications.
Publications (scholar, dblp)
Author order is alphabetical for papers following the theoretical-cryptography convention.
-
A Modular Approach for Keyed-Verification Anonymous Credentials [ePrint]
Michele Orrù, Lindsey Tulloch, Victor Snyder-Graf, Ian Goldberg
USENIX 2026 (Proceedings of the 35th USENIX Security Symposium) -
A Fiat–Shamir Transformation From Duplex Sponges [ePrint]
Alessandro Chiesa, Michele Orrù
TCC 2025 (Proceedings of the 23rd Theory of Cryptography Conference) -
Revisiting keyed-verification anonymous credentials [ePrint]
Michele Orrù
ACM CCS 2025 (Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security) -
Beyond the circuit: How to Minimize Foreign Arithmetic in ZKP Circuits [ePrint],
Michele Orrù, George Kadianakis, Mary Maller, Greg Zaverucha
IACR Communications in Cryptology (Volume 2, Issue 1) -
Oblivious issuance of proofs [ePrint],
Michele Orrù, Stefano Tessaro, Greg Zaverucha, Chenzhi Zhu
CRYPTO 2024 (Proceedings of the 44th Annual International Cryptology Conference) -
zk-Bench: A Toolset for Comparative Evaluation and Performance Benchmarking of SNARKs [ePrint],
Jens Ernstberger, Stefanos Chaliasos, George Kadianakis, Philipp Jovanovic, Arthur Gervais, Benjamin Livshits, Michele Orrù
SCN 2024 (Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Security in Communication Networks) -
Non-interactive Mimblewimble transactions, revisited [ePrint],
Georg Fuchsbauer, Michele Orrù
ASIACRYPT 2022 (Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security) -
Gemini: an elastic proof system for diverse environments [ePrint] [Talk] [Code],
Jonathan Bootle, Alessandro Chiesa, Yuncong Hu, Michele Orrù
EUROCRYPT 2022 (Proceedings of the 42nd Annual International Conference on Theory and Application of Cryptographic Techniques) -
Publicly verifiable anonymous tokens with private metadata bit [ePrint],
Fabrice Benhamouda, Tancrède Lepoint, Michele Orrù, Mariana Raykova
Preprint. -
A proposal for the standardization of ∑-protocols [PDF] [Talk] [Talk at NIST]
Michele Orrù, Stephan Krenn
4th ZKProof Workshop -
On the (in)security of ROS [ePrint] [Talk],
Best paper award
Fabrice Benhamouda, Tancrède Lepoint, Julian Loss, Michele Orrù, Mariana Raykova
EUROCRYPT 2021 (Proceedings of the 41st Annual International Conference on Theory and Application of Cryptographic Techniques) -
Efficient Anonymous Tokens with Private Metadata Bit [ePrint] [Talk] [Code],
Ben Kreuter, Tancrède Lepoint, Michele Orrù, Mariana Raykova
CRYPTO 2020 (Proceedings of the 40th Annual International Cryptology Conference) -
Aggregate cash systems: A cryptographic investigation of Mimblewimble [ePrint] [Talk],
Georg Fuchsbauer, Michele Orrù, Yannick Seurin
EUROCRYPT 2019 (Proceedings of the 38th Annual International Conference on Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques) -
Lattice-Based zk-SNARKs from SSPs [ePrint] [Talk] [Code],
Rosario Gennaro, Michele Minelli, Michele Orrù, Anca Niţulescu
ACM CCS 2018 (Proceedings of the 25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security) -
Non-Interactive Zaps of Knowledge [ePrint],
Best paper award
Georg Fuchsbauer, Michele Orrù
ACNS 2018 (Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security) -
Homomorphic Secret Sharing: Optimizations and Applications [ePrint],
Elette Boyle, Geoffroy Couteau, Niv Gilboa, Yuval Ishai, Michele Orrù
ACM CCS 2017 (Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security) -
Actively Secure 1-out-of-N OT Extension with Application to Private Set Intersection [ePrint],
Michele Orrù, Emmanuela Orsini, Peter Scholl
CT-RSA 2017 (Proceedings of The Cryptographers’ Track at the RSA Conference 2017)
Selected talks
-
A Fiat–Shamir Transformation From Duplex Sponges
-
On the (in)security of ROS
-
A new software stack for building anonymous credential systems
-
Des preuves zero-knowledge à l’anonymat en ligne
-
Sigma Protocols and Fiat–Shamir
-
Revisiting Keyed-Verification Credentials
Code (github)
I love writing code. Side-quests involve orchestrating old electronic robot toys (I have a bunch of Furbys still that can be used for an art project), proving AES-encrypted messages, and other useless things.
I help maintain arkworks.rs, a library ecosystem for zero-knowledge proof development, and sigma-rs, an anonymous credential stack. I am the author of Spongefish, a library for the Fiat–Shamir transformation, and the OCaml letsencrypt library for unikernels. In the past, I contributed to Python, Debian, and Tor.