🧑‍🏫 ZKDL Camp Lecture Notes

This is a series of lectures on zero-knowledge conducted internally at Distributed Lab, in which we explained from scratch how SNARKs (Groth16, PLONK), STARKs, Bulletproofs (in the future, perhaps also Folding schemes) work.

It is important that this course is designed for a full low-level understanding of these protocols and, accordingly, all the mathematics on which the protocols are based. That is why the course covers both zk itself and its application, directly, but also the basic level of mathematics needed to understand zk and cryptography in general.

📂 Structure

Folder/File	Description
lectures	Contains the written material for the lectures: both .tex and compiled .pdf files. If you want to add your lecture, you need to navigate to this folder.
lectures/images	Contains images used in the lectures.
presentations	Contains the beamer presentations for the lectures.
zkdl-template.cls	The style file for the lectures. Do not touch unless needed.
lecture-notes.tex	The compilation of all lectures. Uses lecture files from lectures and compiles them into a single file lecture-notes.pdf
topics.tex	The list of topics to be covered in the lectures.

🏃‍♂️ Setup to run locally

1. Download LaTeX locally (e.g. TeX Live, if you are using MacOS: MacTex).
2. Download relevant VSCode extensions: LaTex, LaTex Workshop etc.
3. Clone the repository.
4. Open in VSCode and run the lecture-notes.tex file (green arrow at the top of the window).

📚 How to add your lecture?

1. Conduct the steps above and make sure you can compile everything locally.

2. Create a new .tex file in the lectures folder. Name it <number>-<topic>.tex, where <number> is the next number in the sequence.

3. Add lecture to the lecture-notes.tex file. For example, if the code looks as:

   \section{Mathematics Preliminaries}
   
   \subfile{lectures/1-math}
   
   \section{Elliptic Curves}
   
   \subfile{lectures/2-ec}

   and you want to add lectures/3-commitment-schemes, you do

   \section{Mathematics Preliminaries}
   
   \subfile{lectures/1-math}
   
   \section{Elliptic Curves}
   
   \subfile{lectures/2-ec}
   
   \section{Commitment Schemes}
   
   \subfile{lectures/3-commitment-schemes}

4. To add the presentation, navigate to the presentations folder and add the same name as for your lecture file.