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zcash
mpc
Rust2016–2019
zcash / mpc

mpc

zk-SNARK parameter multi-party computation protocol

Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
4Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
179GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

zk-SNARK parameter multi-party computation protocol

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month4 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-11-17 17:55:22 UTC to 2019-01-11 18:48:00 UTC.

0122016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsNov 20162016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsDec 20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsJan 2019

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Nov 20162016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Dec 20162016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20172017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20172017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20172017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20172017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20172017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20172017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20172017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20172017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20172017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC202
Nov 20172017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20172017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20182018-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20182018-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20182018-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20182018-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20182018-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20182018-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20182018-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20182018-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20182018-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20182018-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20182018-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-02-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

4 sources
petertodd·Oct 9, 2017
What my blog actually said about that was: "I’ve had some experts tell me they thought the security level was 2^80 operations (very weak), while others (including Zooko himself) thought it was [more like 2^96](https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/curves/2016/000742.htm...). I’m not sure which figure is right, but the fact that there’s disagreement is a bad sign." I made it very clear that it is an unsubstantiated figure, and linked to Zooko's analysis. To both yourself and the person you're replying too, please don't put words in my mouth. > We provided participants with a reproducibly built and stripped down version of Alpine Linux, employed grsec, wrote all of our crypto software in pure Rust, etc. All of our software is reproducibly built, hashed and signed. There is nothing (software-wise) that cannot be caught in post-hoc review. Al
Read the rest
l of it is open-source: https://github.com/zcash/mpc I agree. But that's not what I said; what I said is that post-hoc review hasn't been done, even a year after the fact.
In Cypherpunk Desert Bus: My Role in the 2016 Zcash Trusted Setup Ceremony
ewillbefull·Oct 9, 2017
> 2^80 is not very weak. That's the level of brute forcing a SHA-1 collision. It's low for a new system, but not very weak. Note that the 2^80 figure from Peter's blog post is really unsubstantiated. There's another curve in libsnark (which we don't use) that has 80-bits of security. I suspect what happened is whoever Peter was consulting with just repeated this number to him. We've spoken to many cryptographers who are experts on these curves, and none of them think that figure is reasonable. I actually don't believe there are _any_ cryptographers that have publicly made such a claim about the security. 2^96 was the original conservative estimate when the NFS attack was discovered, but subsequent analysis showed concrete security closer to 2^110 (and that's ignoring the unrealistic memory costs of the specific attack.) > How can they not
Read the rest
have the basics of a secure toolchain?!? We provided participants with a reproducibly built and stripped down version of Alpine Linux, employed grsec, wrote all of our crypto software in pure Rust, etc. All of our software is reproducibly built, hashed and signed. There is nothing (software-wise) that cannot be caught in post-hoc review. All of it is open-source: https://github.com/zcash/mpc Several academic papers regarding our protocol have been published since then. We wrote a full security proof of the crypto. We hired NCC group to audit the ceremony as well: https://z.cash/blog/ceremony-audit-results.html More auditing can always be done but this is a continuing process. The primary goal is to make it difficult for someone to undetectably compromise the ceremony.
In Cypherpunk Desert Bus: My Role in the 2016 Zcash Trusted Setup Ceremony

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