zkSNARKS, the underlying tricky bit of crypto that Zerocash uses to make anonymous transactions, existed before Zerocash/Zcash. There is a bunch of work on them that was published in Eurocrypt/Crypto/TCC etc. For example [0] at Eurocrypt and [1] at Crypto. Page 37 of that last paper [2] has a summary of work on the subject, though it is now dated as the paper is from 2013.
SNARKs have gotten the appropriate peer review from the right parts of academia. To everyone else reading this: Of course, that doesn't make it secure and there are limmits to peer review. Just because 3 to 5 reviewers read the paper and thought it was publishable doesn't mean it's correct. However, those works were high enough profile that others have looked at the papers once they were published, which is the real meaningful part of peer review and that comes after publication.
None the less, snarks are one of the more sophisticated cryptogrphic techniques ever deployed. And peer review also says abosultely nothing about the security of the implimentations of software instantiating the cryptography. But the only way to remidy that is to build software, deploy it, and get people to look at it.
Zerocash itself is a fairly simple protocol built on top of SNARKs, so the fact that it was published at Oakland isn't the biggest worry. It's also gotten a bunch of scrutiny after that.
SNARKs have gotten the appropriate peer review from the right parts of academia. To everyone else reading this: Of course, that doesn't make it secure and there are limmits to peer review. Just because 3 to 5 reviewers read the paper and thought it was publishable doesn't mean it's correct. However, those works were high enough profile that others have looked at the papers once they were published, which is the real meaningful part of peer review and that comes after publication.
None the less, snarks are one of the more sophisticated cryptogrphic techniques ever deployed. And peer review also says abosultely nothing about the security of the implimentations of software instantiating the cryptography. But the only way to remidy that is to build software, deploy it, and get people to look at it.
Zerocash itself is a fairly simple protocol built on top of SNARKs, so the fact that it was published at Oakland isn't the biggest worry. It's also gotten a bunch of scrutiny after that.
[0] http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-38348-9_3... [1] http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-40084-1_6... [2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/507.pdf