Zksecurity
Research and audit firm for cryptography and blockchain security
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About Zksecurity
Zksecurity is a security audit firm focused on cryptography, serving protocols that use zero-knowledge proofs, multi-party computation, fully homomorphic encryption and post-quantum schemes: work covers circuit review, formal verification of protocol design and implementation, and assessment of attack surfaces in proof systems.
It targets the scarcity of audit capacity for cryptography, where generalist teams know Solidity but not necessarily circuit constraints, and a wrong constraint can let proofs be forged or funds withdrawn from nothing. The team also builds automated tooling that uses AI to hunt for bugs. The limit is the service model: findings cover the agreed scope, underlying assumptions of cryptographic libraries usually sit outside review, and clients get no payout guarantee of any kind.
zkSecurity was founded on May 30, 2023, initially as a ZK circuit auditing firm. Early milestones include the departure of co-founder Brandon to become CEO of O(1) Labs, while Gregor and Mathias joined full-time, growing the team to about 10 engineers. The company expanded from pure ZK audits to broader advanced cryptography, covering MPC, FHE, TEEs, threshold signatures, and consensus protocols. In 2024, they released Circomscribe, a debugging tool for Circom circuits, and published a taxonomy of ZK vulnerabilities. A significant development came in 2026 with the launch of zkao, an AI-powered continuous security scanner that encodes patterns from their 100+ audits. That same year, they identified the first two known exploits against live ZK circuits—both stemming from Groth16 verifiers with incorrect setups—and integrated detection for this vulnerability class into zkao.
zkSecurity delivered a steady stream of cryptography security audits and research through 2026, publishing reports on Zcash Orchard (July, for Tachyon Foundation), OpenVM 2.0 (June, for Axiom), Zeko circuits and sequencer/DA layer (June), Mina's Decentralised Treasury (April), Aptos Confidential Assets (March), HumanityLink aid distribution (June), SecondFi proof-tool circuits (September) and adversarial testing of Zcash Ironwood formal verification (September). Its AI security platform zkao went live, running agents that continuously scan cryptographic code for vulnerabilities and improve over time; the open-source clean project formally verifies a zkEVM in Lean 4 (backed by the Ethereum Foundation, 1.2k GitHub stars), and it launched mpcsec.org with Trail of Bits, Partisia and Zama as a collaborative reference for MPC implementation pitfalls.
Future strategy and roadmap: Forward: zkao agents will keep re-running and surface new bugs as they improve, offering always-on automated auditing; the clean framework extends toward formally verified zkVMs, broadening coverage from verified circuits to verified virtual machines; mpcsec.org will keep expanding as a community reference, reinforcing zkSecurity's role in ZK/MPC/FHE and post-quantum cryptography research and tooling.
David Wong — Co-founder; ex-security lead for Facebook Diem/Libra, author of Real-World Cryptography.
Brandon — Co-founder; founding engineer at Mina, ex-Pinterest/Facebook.
Gregor Mitscha-Baude — Co-founder; tech lead of SnarkyJS, ZPrize winner. Cryptography security audit firm focused on ZK, MPC, FHE.
Zksecurity recently welcomed Kobi Gurkan as a Research member in August 2026. Kobi brings deep expertise in applied cryptography, SNARKs, and threshold schemes, previously contributing to projects like cpsnarks-set and aggregatable-dkg. His addition strengthens Zksecurity's research capabilities for zero-knowledge security audits.
No departures were reported during this period.