I’m very pleased to announce that — along with George Danezis and Tomaso Aste, head of our Financial Computing group — I’ve been awarded a grant to continue our work on distributed ledgers (aka “blockchain-like things”) for the next three years.
Our group has already done a lot of research in this space, including George’s and my recent paper on centrally banked cryptocurrencies (at NDSS 2016) and Jens’ paper (along with Markulf Kohlweiss, a frequent UCL collaborator) on efficient ring signatures and applications to Zerocoin-style cryptocurrencies (at Eurocrypt 2015). It’s great to have this opportunity to further investigate the challenges in this space and develop our vision for the future of these technologies, so big thanks to the EPSRC!
Anyway, the point of this post is to advertise, as part of this grant, three positions for postdoctoral researchers. We are also seeking collaboration with any industrial partners investigating the potential usage of distributed ledgers, and in particular ones looking at the application of these ledgers across the following settings (or with a whole new setting in mind!):
- Identity management. How can identities be stored, shared, and issued in a way that preserves privacy, prevents theft and fraud, and allows for informal forms of identity in places where no formal ones exist?
- Supply chain transparency. How can supply chain information be stored in a way that proves integrity, preserves the privacy of individual actors, and can be presented to the end customer in a productive way?
- Financial settlement. How can banking information be stored in a way that allows banks to easily perform gross settlement, reduces the burden on a central bank, and enables auditability of the proper functioning of the system?
- Administration of benefits. How can benefits be administered to and used by disadvantaged populations in a way that preserves privacy, provides useful visibility into their spending, and protects against potential abuses of the system?
We expect the postdoctoral researchers to work with us and with each other on the many exciting problems in this space, which are spread across cryptography, computer and network security, behavioural economics, distributed systems, usable security, human-computer interaction, and software engineering (just to name a few!). I encourage anyone interested to reach out to me (Sarah) to discuss this further, whether or not they’ve already done research on the particular topic of distributed ledgers.
That’s all for now, but please get in touch with me if you have any questions, and in the years to come I hope to invite many people to come work with us in London and to announce the various outcomes of this exciting project!