At the ПЭУ in Yerevan. Photo Credit: Mitya Lyalin.

Bio

My name is Alexander Frolov, though I often go by Sasha. Alexander and Sasha Frolov are the same person. I'm currently a first-year Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland working on cryptography. My advisors are Ian Miers and Gabe Kaptchuk. Previously, I was an engineer on the Cryptography Engineering team at Meta for about 3 years, and before that I did my master's and bachelor's at Cornell University. My hobbies include cycling, swimming, stand-up/sketch comedy and editing Wikipedia.

Recent Blog Posts

• Trade-offs and Pitfalls in zkVM design (or, some ways to make your zkVM code 3-10 times slower)
• 2 New Applications of zk-SNARKs (Free Ideas!)
• My Shenandoah National Park Itinerary

Publications

• CanDID: Can-Do Decentralized Identity with Legacy Compatibility, Sybil-Resistance, and Accountability
  Deepak Maram, Harjasleen Malvai, Fan Zhang, Nerla Jean-Louis, Alexander Frolov, Tyler Kell, Tyrone Lobban, Christine Moy, Ari Juels, and Andrew Miller
  IEEE S&P 2021
  


• Statistical Properties of Soft X-ray emission of Solar Flares
  Viacheslav M Sadykov, Alexander G Kosovichev, Irina N Kitiashvili, Alexander Frolov
  The Astrophysical Journal
  

Industry Research

• How Meta Built Large-Scale Cryptographic Monitoring
  Hussain Humadi, Sasha Frolov, Rafael Misoczki, Dong Wu.
  Post on Meta Engineering blog
  


• DNDK AES GCM
  Work done as part of Meta Cryptography Infrastructure team.
  Talk at Real World Crypto 2024 by Shay Gueron
  RFC in submission
  


• Purple Llama CyberSecEval: A Secure Coding Benchmark for Language Models
  Manish Bhatt, Sahana Chennabasappa, Cyrus Nikolaidis, Shengye Wan, Ivan Evtimov, Dominik Gabi, Daniel Song, Faizan Ahmad, Cornelius Aschermann, Lorenzo Fontana, Sasha Frolov, Ravi Prakash Giri, Dhaval Kapil, Yiannis Kozyrakis, David LeBlanc, James Milazzo, Aleksandar Straumann, Gabriel Synnaeve, Varun Vontimitta, Spencer Whitman, Joshua Saxe.
  Preprint/Presented at a workshop at NeurIPS 2023
  


• Meta's updates at RWPQC 2024
  Rafael Misoczki, Sasha Frolov.
  Presentation at RWPQC 2024
  

Preprints

• Zero Knowledge Memory-Checking Techniques for Stacks and Queues
  Alexander Frolov
  Preprint