Hey! I'm David, cofounder of zkSecurity and the author of the Real-World Cryptography book. I was previously a crypto architect at O(1) Labs (working on the Mina cryptocurrency), before that I was the security lead for Diem (formerly Libra) at Novi (Facebook), and a security consultant for the Cryptography Services of NCC Group. This is my blog about cryptography and security and other related topics that I find interesting.
Threat modeling over mindless improvements.
Secure early rather than later.
Forcing software over forcing people.
Role play over complacency.
So I made my own! Without further ado:
Put it in writing. If you leave for a month-long spiritual trip and someone needs to fix a bug in your code, will they have to wait for you? If an expert wants to assess the algorithm you're implementing, but have no knowledge in the programming language you used, will they manage to do it? These are questions you should ask yourself when writing a complex piece of code. It happens often enough that a protocol is implemented differently from the paper. Write specifications!
The concorde is fast but dangerous. When writing optimized, faster code, or perhaps over-engineered or overly-clever code, you're trading off maintainability, clarity, and thus security of your code. I often hear programming language features claiming zero-overhead, but they always forget to talk about the cost paid in ambiguity and complexity.
Plant types and data structures, then water. As Rob Pike says, use the right data structures, from there everything should flow naturally. Well documented structures are the best abstraction you'll find. Furthermore, functions that make too many assumptions on their inputs will have trouble down the line when someone changes the code underneath them. Encoding invariants in your types is a great way to address this issue. The bottom line is that you can get most of your clarity and security through creating the right types and objects!
Don't let your dependencies grow on you. Dependencies easily grow like cancer cells. Beware of them. Analyse your dependencies, monitor and review the ones you use, rewrite or copy code to avoid importing large dependencies, and add friction to your process of adding new dependencies. Supply-chain attacks are being more and more of a thing, be aware.
Make the robots enforce it. Enforce good code patterns and prevent bad code patterns through continuous integration where you can. This is pretty much to the "forcing software over forcing people" of the Risk Manifesto.
Design lego cities, not real ones. The less connected your code is, the clearer it is to follow as the different parts will be self-contained, and the easier it will be to update some part of the code. Think about parts of your code as external libraries that are facing more than just your codebase.
Believe it or not, even though I was one of the participant in the standardization of ERC-721, the Ethereum standard for NFTs, I had never read the final standard, yet alone written an ERC-721 smart contract. At the time I was against the standard, at least in its form, due to its collision with the ERC-20 standard (you can't create a smart contract that is both a compliant ERC-20 token and a compliant ERC-721 NFT). My arguments ended up losing, ERC-721 was standardized with the same function names as ERC-20, and I heard that today another standard is surfacing (ERC 1155) to fix this flaw (among others).
Anyway, I recently decided to bury the hatchet and read the damn standard. And after a few weekends of hacking with my friends Eric Khun and Simon Patole, we wrote an ERC-721 compliant dapp as an art project. It's called project memento and it boasts a grid of tiles each containing a letter, a-la million dollar page. People can acquire letters, alter them, and form lines (or diagonals) of words together. I'm curious as to what will become of this, but this was fun!
Today I received the first copy of my book Real-World Cryptography! You can't imagine how much sweat and love I put into this work in the last two years and a half. It's the book I've always wanted to read, and it's the book I thought the field was missing. It's the book I wanted to have as a student when I was learning about hash functions and ciphers, and it's the book I wish I could have referred to my fellow pentesters when they had questions about TLS or end-to-end encryption. It's the book I'd use as a developer looking for cryptographic libraries and best practice. It's the first book with a cryptocurrency chapter, and it's the book cryptographers will read to learn about password-authenticated key exchanges, sponge functions, the noise protocol framework, post-quantum cryptography, and zero-knowledge proofs. Real-world cryptography is what the field of applied cryptography really looks like today. It's all there.
If you've been following my blog recently, you must have seen that I joined O(1) Labs to work on the Mina cryptocurrency. Why? Simply because I felt like it was the most interesting project in the space, and now that I'm deep in OCaml and Rust code trying to understand PLONK and other state-of-the-art zero-knowledge proof systems work I can tell you that it is indeed the most interesting project in the space :)
My two zero-knowledge friends are too busy doing a PhD. They like self-inflicted pain. (Mathias and Michael, I'm looking at you.) So if you're free, ping me! And if you're not free, ping me anyway because we might be able to work something out.
But realistically, just contact me on twitter or here if you have any question about what the culture of the company is, what your day-to-day would look like, and if you can work remotely (yes).
In this eleventh video, I go back to the PLONK protocol and finally explain how it works with polynomial commitments. This version of the protocol is not finished, as it doesn't have zero-knowledgeness (the polynomial evaluations leak information about the polynomials) and the wiring (or copy constraint) has not been enforced (e.g. the output wire of this gate should be the left wire of this other gate). In the next video, I will explain how copy constraints can be enforced via the PLONK permutation argument.
In this tenth video, I explain how the Kate polynomial commitment scheme works. For more information about it, check this other blogpost I wrote. This polynomial commitment scheme will be useful to force the prover to commit to its polynomials before learning the random point they need to be evaluated at.
In this ninth video, I explain what polynomial commitment schemes are as well as their API. I also mention the Kate polynomial commitment scheme (KZG), based on pairings, and bootle/bulletproof types of polynomial commitments schemes, based on inner products.
In this eighth video, I explain how the prover and the verifier can perform a "polynomial dance" in order to construct the circuit polynomial $f$. The principle is simple: the prover doesn't want to leak information about the private inputs and the intermediary values in the circuit, and the verifier doesn't want to give the prover too much freedom in the way they construct the circuit polynomial $f$.
