Events

Faculty Candidate Talk Rethinking security for emerging decentralized systems
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Speaker: Mahimna Kelkar

Bio

Mahimna Kelkar is a final-year PhD student at Cornell University. His research broadly focuses on applied cryptography and the foundations of security for blockchains. His work has received recognition through paper awards at CCS’24 and APKC’22 and has been adopted by multiple blockchain companies.

Location : CoRE 301

Committee: 

Event Type: Faculty Candidate Talk

Abstract: In the past few years, blockchains have emerged as a new class of decentralized systems with wide-ranging applications. But the promise of blockchains has been marred by hype, speculation, and a plethora of high-profile attacks. In this talk, I will demonstrate why blockchain security is challenging---blockchains operate in a radically new, highly adversarial environment where anonymous actors can immediately monetize subtle protocol flaws. I will show powerful new attacks that provide novel insights on two well-studied security primitives---Byzantine consensus within distributed systems, and proofs-of-knowledge within cryptography. Finally, I will discuss why understanding blockchain security has broader utility, and how it can provide a guiding principle when designing secure systems.

Organization: 

Contact  Professor Santosh Nagarakatte

Join Zoom Meeting
https://rutgers.zoom.us/j/2014444359?pwd=WW9ybFNCNVFrUWlycHowSHdNZjhzUT09

Meeting ID: 201 444 4359
Password: 550978