Tjaden Hess
Security Engineer II, Cryptography at Trail of Bits
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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RockstarTjaden Hess is a Security Engineer II specializing in cryptography with 11 years of engineering experience, currently advancing applied crypto and program analysis at Trail of Bits in New York. He focuses on making zero-knowledge proofs, MPC, and formal verification practical and trustworthy for critical systems, combining research-minded rigor with production engineering. His open-source work includes substantive contributions to ZoKrates (a zkSNARK toolbox for Ethereum) and the Rust LR(1) parser generator LALRPOP, evidencing deep familiarity with parsing, language design, and correctness. Colleagues rely on him to bridge formal methods and real-world tooling, and he often surfaces subtle implementation issues—like parser type-annotation edge cases and boolean-expression flattening—that improve both security and developer ergonomics.
10 years of coding experience
English, solidity, ocaml, c / c++, rust, haskell
Stackoverflow
291reputation
4kreached
3answers
3questions
Github Skills (19)
parser10
boolean-logic10
testing10
zeroth10
grammar10
grammars10
parsing10
parser-generator10
parse10
rust10
ethereum9
language-design9
truffle6
hash6
bitfield6
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
Zokrates/ZoKrates
Sep 2018 - Nov 2018
A toolbox for zkSNARKs on Ethereum
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:40 commits, 3 PRs, 5 comments in 2 months
Contributions summary:Tjaden primarily contributed to the development of the ZoKrates toolbox by adding and modifying features related to boolean logic and parsing. Their work included adding boolean AND and OR operators to the language, implementing parsing logic, and fixing errors in parsing conditions. They also modified the code to include the implementation of flattening expressions.
snarkethereumverifiable-computationtoolboxzero-knowledge
lalrpop/lalrpop
Nov 2018 - Nov 2018
LR(1) parser generator for Rust
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 1 PR, 4 comments in 17 days
Contributions summary:Tjaden primarily contributed to testing and refining the LALRPOP parser generator. They implemented and reduced test cases to address specific issues related to generic macros and type parameter propagation within the parsing logic. Their work involved modifying the grammar definition files and the Rust code that generates the parser, demonstrating an understanding of the parser's internal workings. Furthermore, they addressed the need to annotate types when type parameters exist.
rustgrammarparsingparser-generatorpeg
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