I'm a cryptography engineer (or perhaps an applied cryptographer). My professional interests include implementation of secure, misuse-resistant cryptographic protocols in Rust, security analysis of protocol designs and implementations, and generally contributing to the ecosystem of open-source privacy-enhancing tools available to users. I'm particularly focused on secure multi-party computation; my dissertation focused on general-purpose MPC software developed in academia and my recent work includes development on a threshold ECDSA signing scheme.

Outside of work, I read books, work out (lifting, running, and bouldering), and go outside. I also enjoy occasional craft projects and this website.

Work experiences

I currently work as a research engineer at Galois, addressing problems related to secure computation. Previously, I was a cryptographic engineer at Bolt Labs, developing protocols and open-source software that use secure computation to enable financial privacy. You can see some of this work via my GitHub page.

I received my PhD in 2021 from the Distributed Systems Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, where I was advised by Nadia Heninger. My research focused on secure multi-party computation (MPC) as it transitions from a theoretical academic construct into a practical tool for privacy preserving data computations. I spent summer 2020 at Microsoft Research, working with Hao Chen at the Cryptography and Privacy Research group and summer 2019 at Boston University, working with SAIL on JIFF, a framework for MPC.

Publications

Privacy-Preserving Network Analytics. Marcella Hastings, Brett Hemenway Falk, and Gerry Tsoukalas. Management Science 2022. [MS]

Secure Multi-party Computation in Practice. Marcella Hastings. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. 2021.

The Proof is in the Pudding: Proofs of Work for Solving Discrete Logarithms. Marcella Hastings, Nadia Heninger, and Eric Wustrow. FC 2019.

SoK: General Purpose Frameworks for Secure Multi-Party Computation. Marcella Hastings, Brett Hemenway Falk, Daniel Noble, and Steve Zdancewic. Oakland 2019. [IEEE]
I created a software repository with build environments for every tool we surveyed, plus some new ones.

Measuring small subgroup attacks against Diffie-Hellman. Luke Valenta, David Adrian, Antonio Sanso, Shaanan Cohney, Joshua Fried, Marcella Hastings, J. Alex Halderman, and Nadia Heninger. NDSS 2017.

Weak keys remain widespread in network devices. Marcella Hastings, Joshua Fried, and Nadia Heninger. IMC 2016. [ACM] [slides].