Programme

Zero-knowledge proofs are powering an increasing number of applications. A main driver of adoption is that proofs can be succinct. Succinctness allows users to cheaply verify a computation without having to recompute. In the blockchain space, the Ethereum Foundation is now talking about a zero-knowledge singularity, where the main job of the Ethereum chain no longer is to do computation directly but to order and verify batches of external computation. Designing proofs directly for applications is cumbersome and error-prone. Zero-knowledge virtual machines in contrast make it easy for developers to express the statements they want to prove. When using a zkVM you compile a program written in a high-level language, e.g., Rust or Solidity, to a VM program. The zkVM then executes the VM program and attaches a succinct proof to the VM output that it has been correctly computed.

Bio: Jens Groth is Chief Scientist at Nexus. In the past he has been Professor of Cryptology at UCL and Principal Researcher & Director of Research at DFINITY. Groth’s research focus is on zero-knowledge proofs, with notable achievements including the invention of pairing-based SNARKs and co-inventions of pairing-friendly proof systems, logarithmic size proofs in cyclic groups, prover-efficient proofs with constant overhead, and usage of lookups in proving correct machine execution. His contributions have been recognized with test-of-time awards in 2021 and 2023 by the International Association for Cryptologic Research.

Modern blockchains are marvels of cryptography and security engineering. They embody the latest advances in language based security, distributed systems security, advanced cryptography, and security economics. They allow unprecedented expressivity for commercial integrity policies, and unparalleled strength of mechanism. Yet they are still largely used for toy applications. In this talk I discuss how modern blockchains have fundamentally different characteristics from early ones in terms of cost, latency, throughput, scaling, expressivity, governance and power consumption. However the evolution from the old to the modern was slow, full of setbacks, and confusion and the significant shift in capabilities was easy to miss. Using the Sui blockchain as an example, I present the current technologies for high-performance consensus, transaction processing, execution and data dissemination. Then, I argue that modern blockchains are particularly useful as a “consistent core” to engineer large open security protocols: from Multi-Party Computations, Private Information Retrieval, Onion Routing to Certificate / Binary transparency. In brief, assuming their modern capabilities, modern blockchains can resolve the hard coordination problems present in large security systems, in a systematic, performant and secure manner. They are a tool every security engineer needs to have in their toolbox.

Bio: Prof George Danezis, B.A, M.A (Cantab), Ph.D, FBCS. George Danezis is Professor of Security and Privacy Engineering at the Department of Computer Science, University College London. He co-founded and acts as Chief Scientist at Mysten Labs since 2021. George has conducted research on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET) and Decentralised / Distributed Systems Security since 2000. His current research interests focus around secure communications, high-integrity systems to support privacy, blockchains and decentralization. In the past, he co-founded chainspace.io in 2018, and had his team acquired in 2019 by Facebook Novi to help design the Diem payment system. In 2021 he departed and co-founded MystenLabs, to help build the Sui smart contracts platform. He has previously been a Researcher for Microsoft Research, Cambridge; a visiting fellow at K.U.Leuven (Belgium); and a research associate at the University of Cambridge (UK).

While softwarization, cloudification, and advanced radio access network (RAN) technologies have been key enablers of current 5G networks, the focuses of next-generation (nextG) mobile networks are likely to shift — integrating AI/ML into networks, adopting Open-RAN architecture, and enhancing security will likely be the key differentiators. This talk centers on security and privacy protection in nextG mobile networks. We will begin with a general discussion of zero-trust architecture, the O-RAN initiative, and key security and privacy challenges in nextG networks. We will then introduce our recent research on enhancing mobile users’ privacy in 5G and beyond networks. I will introduce AAKA, an anonymous authentication and key agreement protocol that allows mobile users to access the mobile network anonymously, effectively thwarting tracking by mobile network operators. I will also introduce UCBlocker, a user-defined, policy-based, end-to-end system to block unwanted calls (e.g., scam and spam calls) in mobile networks. Both works are inspired by emerging decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and anonymous credentials technologies.

Bio: Wenjing Lou is the W. C. English Endowed Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech and a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM. Her research interests cover many topics in the cybersecurity field, with her current research interest focusing on wireless networks, blockchain systems, trustworthy machine learning systems, and security and privacy problems in the Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Prof. Lou is a highly cited researcher by the Web of Science Group. She received the Virginia Tech Alumni Award for Research Excellence in 2018, the highest university-level faculty research award. She received the INFOCOM Test-of-Time paper award in 2020. She was the TPC chair for IEEE INFOCOM 2019 and ACM WiSec 2020. She was the Steering Committee Chair for IEEE CNS conference from 2013 to 2020. She is currently a steering committee member of IEEE INFOCOM and IEEE CNS. She served as a program director at US National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2014 to 2017.