Happy Juneteenth y’all. Here are the updates from this week:
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ZF’s DNS seeders are live. In this blog post, GTank explains what a DNS seeder is and why it’s important to decentralizing Zcash.
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Heartwood security assessment turns up no major issues. ECC’s Security team also shares results of the ECC wallet threat model and security assessments.
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ECC’s Ben Wilson explains how the DevInfra team has been experimenting with Kubernetes, an open-source project to manage containerized workloads.
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It’s not too late to participate in the Protect Privacy Hackathon. Deadline has been extended until July 6th. Developers are invited to compete for $6000 in bounties. Here are the key links:
- Register here. Need ideas? Here’s a list of hackathon suggestions. Need a team, join one of the existing projects looking for team members.
- Check out the recording from the ECC workshop earlier this week.
- Register for ECC/ Zcash Office Hours for live support with our wallet team.
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ICYMI - here are recordings from past events
- Sean’s ZK Study Club earlier this week on Halo and accumulation schemes
- Videos are up from Mainnet Messari conference. Check out Josh Swihart’s Zcash Project Update and the Governing Chaos panel with Zooko, Peter Van Valkenburg and Mario Laul. Also of interest, the blockchain analysis vs blockchain surveillance debate with Alex Gladstein/ HRF and Tom Robinson/ Elliptic.
Mark your calendars,
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Thur, 6/25 at 17:00 UTC, Daira will be doing a ZK Study Club on Halo. Daira will focus on “Halo Optimizations and Constructing Graphs of Elliptic Curves.” Add to your calendar.
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Tues, 6/30, Zeal Call: We’re spotlighting hackathon submissions and Presidio Principles with special guest Sheila Warren from the World Economic Forum. More info here. Register here.
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Thur, 7/7, inaugural Arborist call, registration link coming soon.
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Tues, 7/2, July Gardening club, register here.
Community Shout Outs - Shout out to Nightwallet, agnelvishal, rejojelestine, domnicamalan, and joshuayabut for submitting projects to the hackathon. Keep up the great work!
Documentation updates
- New: Memo field doc
- Updates
- Zcashd API docs
- Wallet backup instructions
- Zcash conf guide
- Troubleshooting guide
- Tor support
- Testing instructions on documentation–95% finished
DevInfra updates
- Pushed Zcash Android SDK builder on Dockerhub: Docker Hub
- Completed initial CI for Zcash iOS Framework & Zcash-ios-wallet
- Successful tests run for Tekton Android Wallet CI on zcash-android-wallet-sdk
Core updates
- NU4 specification audit completed, no major issues identified
- Minor ZIP and spec verbiage suggestions primarily, which are being incorporated
- Made significant progress on NU4 ZIP implementations
- TZE branch for BOLT Labs is now complete
- Being tested by dev-inf with Testnet-in-a-Box!
- Made good progress on Rust refactorings
Security updates
- Fuzzing challenge opened and extended
- NU4 design external security assessment complete
- NU3 implementation external security assessment blog up
- Wrote post, analyzed bugs
- Begun the process of digging out and re-analyzing old bugs in zcash/zcash
- Closed some, some labelled fix_next and some labelled fix_someday
- Mobile wallet security assessment and threat model blog post gone up
Wallet updates
- Android and iOS Wallets are open-source and people are already forking the code to launch their own apps. Hurray!
- Hackathon activities
- Hosting office hours and code walk-thrus for developers
- Working on a hackathon project to allow groups to save money together
- Experimenting with view keys directly in the design for the saving pools, memo field as the “communication protocol” of the savings circle, modified and simplified version of a “liberated payments” style technology.
This week in privacy, NYC becomes the 14th city in the US to adopt a police surveillance transparency law. Zoom will offer E2E encryption to all users after mounting public pressure. Be mindful of browser extensions or add-ons. Researchers recently discovered a massive spyware effort through Google’s Chrome store. China is building a massive DNA database, Thermo Fisher an American company is supplying the kits. Wired reports that dating apps exposed 845 GB of sensitive data, here’s the kicker: “This was not a hack; it was sloppily stored data.”
In crypto news, ECC’s Sean Bowe gets a shoutout in a recent Coindesk article discussing Zcash privacy tech in Eth 2.0. Indian government considers a bill to ban cryptocurrencies. I just discovered the Formal Verification newsletter, they did a deep-dive on Zcash a few months ago which is worth a read. That’s all for now. Have a great weekend y’all!
