Abstract: Blockchain technologies promise decentralization and transparency, but they continue to face critical challenges in privacy, accountability, and scalability—often having to trade off one for the other.  In this talk I will cover some recent research results where we develop and apply advanced cryptographic techniques in order to enhance blockchain technologies. The discussion will cover blind multisignatures, which enable anonymous yet verifiable transactions; zkLogin, a method for privacy-preserving authentication using existing credentials; ZK proofs for blockchain accountability; and accumulators, cryptographic data structures that support scalable and secure membership proofs.

Bio:

Foteini Baldimtsi is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at George Mason University and Research Advisor in the Cryptography team of Mysten Labs/Sui. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University in May 2014 and worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Boston University and University of Athens. Her research interests are in the areas of cryptography, security and data privacy. She focuses on designing provably secure cryptographic schemes for a variety of applications such as privacy preserving identity management and private and scalable blockchain transactions. She is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award as well as Google, IBM and Facebook faculty awards. Her research is funded by NSF, DHS, NSA, CCI, Protocol Labs and the Zcash Foundation.