Privacy and Scalability for Decentralized Cryptographic Systems

March 10, 2022
3:00-4:00pm ET
Cummings 601, Zoom
Speaker: Pratyush Mishra
Host: Dan Votipka

Abstract

Our existing digital infrastructure requires trust in a small number of centralized entities. The poor fault-tolerance and auditability of this architecture has motivated interest in systems like Ethereum that *decentralize trust across many nodes* by having every node re-execute computations to check their correctness. However, this strategy leads to poor *privacy* and *scalability* guarantees.

In this talk, I will show how to obtain decentralized trust systems that achieve strong privacy and scalability properties by relying on *efficient cryptographic proofs* (zkSNARKs). In particular, I will present ZEXE, a system for *decentralized private computation* where all transactions are indistinguishable from one another, irrespective of the underlying computation.

Bio:

Pratyush Mishra is a cryptographer at Aleo. He recently completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. His research is focused on cryptography and security, with a focus on the theory and practice of succinct cryptographic proof systems, and on efficient systems for secure machine learning. He is a co-author of the arkworks zkSNARK libraries, which are used by several academic and industrial projects.

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Meeting ID: 971 8312 0811

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