My guest today is Jose Aguinaga. Jose is Head of Digital Custody Services at SEBA Bank in Switzerland. He was previously Head of Engineering at HOPR.
Jose is also the creator of passkeys.is and mpc.is, two valuable educational resources that describe and demonstrate passkeys and multi-party computation, respectively.
On this episode, Jose and I go deep on elliptic curve cryptography, ECDSA, passkeys, homomorphic encryption, distributed key generation, account abstraction smart wallets and much more.
If you're interested in the frontier of self custody smart wallet user experience, this episode is for you.
It was a pleasure talking to Jose who is knowledgable, humble, and generous. I hope you enjoy the show.
As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.
Links
Chapters
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:18) Interview start
(00:02:27) Jose’s cryptography origin story
(00:09:15) What is Elliptic curve cryptography?
(00:13:45) What is ECDSA?
(00:20:20) What are Passkeys?
(00:25:10) What is WebAuthn?
(00:28:35) Passkeys (secp256r1) vs EOAs (secp256k1)
(00:31:30) Is the secp256r1 compromised?
(00:39:50) What happens when creating a passkey?
(00:43:55) Passkey UX gotchas & cloud keychain sync
(00:53:45) Advantages of passkeys
(00:57:15) Passkeys as Smart Wallet signers
(01:01:00) Hierarchical deterministic passkeys?
(01:03:25) Cross-origin passkeys
(01:11:20) Public key registries
(01:13:14) largeBlob in Safari 17
(01:15:40) Understanding passkey signatures in DER and CBOR formats
(01:20:10) p-384 support
(01:21:30) MPC: Multi-party computation, homomorphism, Paillier cryptosystems
(01:25:40) DKG: Distributed key generation
(01:29:30) Signing an intent with an MPC DKG
(01:32:20) Threshold signature scheme
(01:35:00) Silence Labs' Decompute MPC for blockchain applications conference
(01:37:15) MPC signing vs smart contract passkey signature verification for Account Abstraction applications
(01:39:40) Lit Protocol
(01:44:40) MPC based AA permissions
(01:48:40) Risks of MPC based smart wallet signing: censorship
(01:51:20) AA Permissions UX
(02:00:28) Know Nothing Labs' Halo2 (zk) based signing
(02:04:30) ZKSync's native 4337
(02:05:52) Outro
