“Give and Take: The Evolving Relationship between Security and Blockchains “
Location: 177 Huntington Ave, conference room 503
Abstract: Blockchain technology provides an innovative model that led to new research frontiers in distributed systems and cryptography. Early blockchain systems focused on building a decentralized currency exchange medium, then smart contracts took this further to permit arbitrary on-chain program execution. Since then, the term Web 3.0 surfaced out indicating a movement towards a decentralized version of the Internet.
This talk explores the give and take relationship between blockchains and security/cryptography. Existing blockchain-based systems still need more efforts to ensure their security and optimize their performance, and at the same time, the blockchain model opened the door for building new cryptographic primitives and extending existing ones with new features. I will present two instances: chainBoost—a secure performance booster for blockchain-based resource markets, and RelaySchnorr—an anonymous proxy signature scheme that supports timed delegation, revocability, and policy enforcement in a non-interactive and fully decentralized way. I will also outline future work directions under this evolving give and take relationship.
Bio: Ghada Almashaqbeh is an assistant professor in the School of Computing at the University of Connecticut. Her research spans cryptography, privacy, and systems security with a focus on blockchain-based systems and distributed cryptographic protocols. Ghada received her PhD from Columbia University in 2019, and before joining UConn, she cofounded CacheCash—a startup that came out of her PhD thesis, and was a cryptographer at NuCypher. She is an affiliated member at the Connecticut Advanced Computing Center and the Engineering for Human Rights Initiative at UConn, a 2023 Foresight Institute Fellow, and a 2023 TLDR fellow. Her research is supported by NSF, Protocol Labs, Uniswap Foundation, and UConn Research Excellence Award.