Marcella Hastings

Cryptography engineering and research at @boltlabsinc

Tweets are mostly about open-source secure computation

[Marcella Hastings @marcella_h_]

My team is hiring! Come write quality Rust code with nice people!

Bonus: we implement fun and useful open-source crypto libraries

[Bolt Labs @boltlabs]

Join our team! We build financial privacy tech for everyone, with great benefits & a strong #remote culture. Check out our open positions!

✨ Software Engineer (#Rust)
✨ Senior Software Engineer (#Rust)

Learn more & apply ➡️ https://t.co/2Qpea86RaW

[Marcella Hastings @marcella_h_]

@zschutzy Congratulations!!

[Marcella Hastings @marcella_h_]

@arihamlin Congrats, doc!!

[Marcella Hastings @marcella_h_]

@GabrielleDeMic2 Congrats, Gabrielle!

[Marcella Hastings @marcella_h_]

This paper is bonkers! Participants annotate how much they trust other parties and the compiler figures out what kind of MPC / zkproof / other protocol will max out security and performance.

https://t.co/y56GcyRafD

[Marcella Hastings @marcella_h_]

@DragosRotaru That is a surprisingly effective format! I'm impressed with the emotive face, it makes the talk so engaging

[Marcella Hastings @marcella_h_]

@HaoChenCrypto Thank you! I'm working at @boltlabsinc and building open-source MPC software for financial privacy

[Marcella Hastings @marcella_h_]

Good news: I passed my PhD defense!

[Marcella Hastings @marcella_h_]

Bolt is hiring! Apply if you want to write MPC software and work with nice people!

[Bolt Labs @boltlabs]

NOW HIRING: Junior #Rust Engineer (remote)! ✨

We build financial privacy tech for everyone, with great benefits & max flexibility. Want to learn challenging stuff & write #RustLang in a collaborative, friendly place? Apply now!

https://t.co/z6hiQ96lFn

[Marcella Hastings @marcella_h_]

@degregat @nicvadivelu When we realized frameworks used platform-specific dependencies, we committed to Docker (seemed easier than VMs).

Iterative development was slow until I figured out caching. There's lots of specific config (e.g. for memory usage, networking) that can affect MPC benchmarks.

[Marcella Hastings @marcella_h_]

@degregat @nicvadivelu Docker can be a bit of a pain, but it worked well for MPC frameworks because they had a huge variety of specific software requirements and fragile build systems.

If data science is more about installing the right set of python deps, Docker might be overkill :)

[Marcella Hastings @marcella_h_]

I updated the frameworks wiki to explain how different frameworks use threshold cryptography

https://t.co/8LhzkQzaYb

Short answer: they use secret-sharing.

For the long answer, come see my talk at the NIST MPTS workshop in a few hours

[Marcella Hastings @marcella_h_]

@JoshuaWBaron @matthew_d_green @aisconnolly @IEEESSP Thanks!! Maintaining this project is the most fun and satisfying thing I do. Would love to keep it up after graduating.

[Marcella Hastings @marcella_h_]

Here's a link directly to the paper, if the above doesn't work

https://t.co/XFuHgq5uVT

[Marcella Hastings @marcella_h_]

Now online: we wrote about using MPC to analyze financial networks!

Econ theory assumes full network information in all their algorithms for stress-tests and stability analysis, but this assumption is wrong!
https://t.co/IpSxrzaZOa

[Marcella Hastings @marcella_h_]

This is joint work with Gerry Tsoukalas at @Wharton and Brett Hemenway at @CisPenn. It's written for econ folks, but MPC people will hopefully enjoy it too!

[Marcella Hastings @marcella_h_]

We implemented a couple of algorithms for measuring the overall value of institutions in a network using SCALE-MAMBA and MPyC. Software is available on request, will be online later in the review process :)

[Marcella Hastings @marcella_h_]

This is all open-source, check out the implementation here:

https://t.co/7dFtrFJkVP

Other code for payment channels is also under the boltlabs-inc account, but I know my audience.

[Marcella Hastings @marcella_h_]

Video demo of what we've been doing at Bolt!

Under the hood, there's an MPC computation doing EC signatures and a bunch of hashes. We used EMP-toolkit for this proof of concept.

[Bolt Labs @boltlabs]

1/ Interested in privacy preserving bitcoin payments using just a single channel? Here is a demo of how to do so using the zkChannels protocol.