Background
Simon Masson is a cryptographer with 8 years of experience in cryptographic research and development. After a PhD at Thales and Université de Lorraine, he worked at Heliax where he contributed to cutting-edge work on elliptic curves and zero-knowledge proof systems, before joining ZKNOX.
Publications
- Fast Elliptic Curve Scalar Multiplications in SN(T)ARK Circuits. LATINCRYPT 2025 (with L. Eagen, Y. El Housni, and T. Piellard).
- Embedded Curves and Embedded Families for SNARK-Friendly Curves. IACR ePrint 2024 (with A. Guillevic).
- Bandersnatch: a fast elliptic curve built over the BLS12-381 scalar field. Designs, Codes and Cryptography Journal 2024 (with A. Sanso and Z. Zhang).
- Algorithmic of curves in the context of bilinear and post-quantum cryptography. PhD manuscript 2021.
- Cocks-Pinch curves of embedding degrees five to eight and optimal ate pairing computation. Designs, Codes and Cryptography Journal 2020 (with A. Guillevic and E. Thomé).
- Verifiable Delay Functions from Supersingular Isogenies and Pairings. ASIACRYPT 2019 (with L. De Feo, C. Petit and A. Sanso).
- Efficient four-dimensional GLV curve with high security. IACR ePrint 2018 (with O. Bernard and R. Dubois).
Current position
At ZKNOX, Simon works on cryptographic primitives integration. His expertise contributes to the development of efficient zero-knowledge circuits and optimized cryptographic primitives, such as:
- FIPS 204 standard implementation on constraint environment (Ledger signer),
- Instantiation of ZK-friendly versions of a PQ signature scheme (MLDSA),
- Circuit optimization for zero-knowledge application,
- Integration of hybrid (pre- and post-quantum) signatures into an ERC4337 account.