From 10,000-Party Protocols to Vibe Coding ZK - Engineering Cryptography Through Black-Box Design

Explore how black-box cryptographic design principles bridge theoretical foundations with practical implementations in this conference talk on secure multiparty computation and zero-knowledge systems. Discover the MPC-in-the-head paradigm and its elegant connection between secure multiparty computation (MPC) and zero knowledge (ZK) protocols, while examining how black-box approaches have narrowed the gap with non-black-box constructions across various cryptographic primitives. Learn about cutting-edge real-world implementations including a maliciously secure, dishonest-majority MPC protocol supporting 10,000 parties for distributed RSA key generation, a high-performance system executing 1,000 auctions in parallel among 60 parties in under 5 minutes with meeting scheduling capabilities, and an intuitive developer-friendly ZK framework portable enough for mobile development. Understand how the pursuit of modularity, efficiency, and broad applicability through black-box constructions has generated fascinating theoretical questions while enabling the development of some of the fastest and most scalable MPC and ZK systems available today, demonstrating the power of black-box cryptography to drive both rigorous theoretical advancement and practical innovation at scale.