Photo of Quang Dao

Quang Dao

PhD Student, Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University

qvd@andrew.cmu.edu

About

I am a fourth-year PhD student at CMU, advised by Aayush Jain and Riad Wahby. I also work part-time at LayerZero as a member of the research team. Before that, I got my MA in Math at the University of Michigan, where I worked with Paul Grubbs.

Research Interests: I work at the intersection of cryptography and formal verification. My goal is to build new verification tools for advanced cryptographic primitives, such as succinct zero-knowledge proofs (SNARKs), and to use these tools to verify the security of existing constructions. I also work on post-quantum cryptography, with a focus on building new primitives from code-based assumptions.

Projects: I created and lead the development of ArkLib, a Lean library for formally verified SNARKs. I also work on VCV-io, a Lean framework for reasoning about cryptographic protocols, which ArkLib is built on top of. I am also a main contributor to Jolt, a state-of-the-art zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) based on structured lookup arguments.

My research is generously supported by the Quad Fellowship, the CyLab Presidential Fellowship, and funding from the Ethereum Foundation.

Preprints

Publications

(* = first author(s). The rest are in alphabetical order.)

Talks

  • ArkLib: Compositional Verification of SNARKs
    Real World Crypto (Mar 2026), Verified zk(E)VM Seminar (Jan 2026), King's College London (Oct 2025), University of Cambridge (Oct 2025), Ethereum's PQ Interop (Oct 2025), CMU PLunch (Sep 2025), University of Luxembourg Crypto Seminar (Jul 2025), CRYPTO Day, Telecom Paris (Jun 2025), EPFL Crypto Seminar (Jun 2025), CMU Formal Cookies (Oct 2024)
  • Lossy Cryptography from Code-Based Assumptions
    MIT CIS Seminar (Nov 2024), BUSec Seminar (Nov 2024), NYU Crypto Reading Group (Nov 2024), CMU CyLab Crypto Seminar (Sep 2024), UCLA Crypto Reading Group (Apr 2024), UToronto Theory Seminar (Mar 2024)
  • Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge from LPN and MQ
    CMU CyLab Crypto Seminar (Sep 2024)
  • Advanced Security for SNARKs: A Survey
    a16z Crypto Research Seminar (Jun 2024)
  • Multi-party Homomorphic Secret Sharing and Sublinear MPC from Sparse LPN
    JP Morgan AlgoCRYPT Seminar (Dec 2023), CMU Crypto Seminar (Nov 2023), NTT Research Seminar (Oct 2023), CyLab Partners Conference (Oct 2023), Vietnam Mathematical Congress (Aug 2023)
  • Weak Fiat-Shamir Attacks on Modern Proof Systems
    Real World Crypto (Mar 2024), CMU CyLab Security Seminar (Nov 2023), Cornell Security Seminar (Sep 2023), NYU Crypto Reading Group (Sep 2023), Workshop on Attacks in Cryptography (Aug 2023)
  • Spartan and Bulletproofs are simulation-extractable (for free!)
    Stanford Crypto Reading Group (May 2023), Telecom Paris Seminar (May 2023), Lattices Meet Hashes Workshop, EPFL (May 2023), CMU Crypto Seminar (Apr 2023)

Service

  • Program Committee: ASIACRYPT 2026
  • External Reviewer: CRYPTO (2026); EUROCRYPT, IEEE S&P, CRYPTO, RANDOM, TCC (2025); STOC, EUROCRYPT, TCC (2024); ASIACRYPT, TCC, FOCS (2023); CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT (2022)
  • Co-Organizer: CMU Crypto Seminar (2022-2025)

Mentorship

  • Chung Nguyen, Post-baccalaureate, 2025-present
  • James Waters, Undergraduate, Fall 2025-present
  • Liam Schilling, Undergraduate, Spring & Fall 2025
  • Ian Martin, Undergraduate, Summer 2025
  • Jack Zhu, Undergraduate, Spring 2025
  • Christian Ang, Undergraduate, Spring 2025

Miscellaneous