Nomadic Labs Research Seminars #25|Randomness generation based on publicly verifiable secret sharing

Описание: The Nomadic Labs Research Seminars series is dedicated to promoting and discussing the extensive list of Tezos research and development projects.

The series includes live presentations from major research projects happening within the Tezos ecosystem. These hour-long sessions consist of an expert-led presentation for 45 minutes plus a 15 minutes live Q&A between developers, academics, and members of the Tezos community.

This session features a presentation by Ignacio Cascudo entitled "Randomness generation based on publicly verifiable secret sharing".

The problem of jointly generating random values in an unpredictable and unbiasable way is important for proof-of-stake blockchains, which require a source of randomness for deciding the leaders of next blocks. In this talk Ignacio will present some recent results on randomness generation protocols using publicly verifiable secret sharing as the main cryptographic building block: these results include ALBATROSS (Cascudo, David, Asiacrypt 2020 https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/644) and Mt. Random (Cascudo, David, Shlomovits, Varlakov, 2021, in submission, https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1096). Ignacio will also discuss that the techniques in these works can be used for other cryptographic problems relevant for blockchains.

Ignacio Cascudo is a research assistant professor at IMDEA Software Institute. He obtained his Ph. D. in Mathematics at the University of Oviedo (Spain) in 2010, later was a postdoc in two prestigious research groups in cryptography, at CWI Amsterdam and Aarhus University, and was assistant and associate professor at Aalborg University, until he moved in 2019 to IMDEA. Ignacio's research interests involve cryptographic protocols, especially the topics of secure multiparty computation and secret sharing, and their connections to other research areas such as the theory of error correcting codes. He has published around 30 research articles, most of them on the main journals and conferences in cryptography, such as Crypto, Eurocrypt and Asiacrypt.