BoscoJacinto

I am writing to express my keen interest in the blockchain and cryptography space. As an architect in the embedded systems space I have always worked on designing software modules and components in C. But with the rise of the popularity of nodejs and javascript, in 2019 I had the opportunity to work on nodejs in an embedded system context. Given my curiosity I quickly started liking it and adapted to it.

Today a similar curiosity has led me to a crossroad in my career. I am excited to start my journey in the blockchain space and contribute in a meaningful way to the
development of the decentralized economy. I developed an interest in blockchain in 2017 and read the book “Blockchain Basics: A Non-Technical Introduction in 25 Steps” but never really thought of switching my career to the blockchain domain.
In late 2020 and early 2021 I got a chance to do a security audit of a smart lock, this led me to learning many concepts of applied cryptography, the basic primitives about key
exchange, hashing, key derivation, public private key cryptography, elliptic curve cryptography, different curves and their representations, pairing etc. The computerphile
and numberphile youtube channels were great learning resources for me.

Stemming from my personal interest I tried to create a security handshake protocol between a smart lock, server and mobile app. I stumbled upon a whitepaper “Elliptic
Curve cryptosystems - by Neal Kobiltz”; with the basic understanding of Elliptic curve point arithmetic and the elliptic npm package to help me I managed to create a
somewhat working copy of the handshake. The challenge-response protocol key exchange is something similar to what Nuki smart lock does.

As of today I got the PoC to a working state by dedicating my complete attention to it for a few weeks in March 2024. 
I explored solidity and other aspects of developing smart contracts, I also tried to understand zSnarks (which i briefly encountered in 2020) and read a lot about Multiparty computation, Zero knowledge proofs. I also briefly participated in a government private working group for a PoC on CBDC for the Reverse Bank Of India.

The smart lock handshake protocol based on Kobiltz’s encoding seemed a natural fit for decentralizing, so after a brief break I started working on the project on April 17 and
currently have a working PoC with a simple frontend in the browser. In the process I got accustomed to a few tools like hardhat, truffle, ganache and libraries like ethers.js,
web3.js and languages like solidity for smart contract and circom for zero knowledge proof and reactjs for the frontend.

Currently I am looking to quench my thirst for this field and contribute to the future and hence I would like to apply for jobs in this industry. I am a very quick learner and can
consume new information very fast.

You can find my work here
https://github.com/rohanjacin/lockcontractZKP (solidity/ethers.js/hardhat smart contract with guest/owner
registration, guest room bidding, guest auth, owner auth, lock auth)
https://github.com/rohanjacin/lockcontractWeb3 (same as above but with web3.js/truffle/ganache)
https://github.com/rohanjacin/lockapp (reactjs basic browser frontend for Owner and Guest)
https://github.com/rohanjacin/lockproof (owner proving system in cicrom/groth16)
https://github.com/rohanjacin/lockhandshake (backend nodejs challenge-response protocol using Kobiltz’s
encoding over elliptic curve points)
LockAppDemo - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xOIctzFMxGwSUTTuY8qSWJCDLykJg3bS/view?usp=drive_link