Mix-net cryptoeconomics: Rebooting privacy-preserving communications as incentive-driven collaborative projects

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Aggelos Kiayias, University of Edinburgh
• Tuesday 27 April 2021, 14:00-15:00
• Webinar - link in abstract.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Jack Hughes.

Applying cryptographic operations in a distributed and collaborative fashion has been for more than four decades a dominant paradigm in the design of privacy-preserving communications systems and specifically mix-nets. The design of such systems present to the end user a guarantee that typically involves a threshold condition. For instance, such condition could have the form “as long as x out of a certain set of y cryptographic keys remain uncompromised then privacy is maintained.” Enforcing the condition is typically out of scope for the system design and the end-user has no tools whatsoever to assess whether the condition holds. As a result, it is typically taken at face value. This is unfortunate as it may lead to deployments where privacy fails – and to make matters worse, no-one may even be aware of it.

In this talk, I will present ongoing work (in collaboration with Claudia Diaz and Harry Halpin) that is pursued in the context of Nym (https://nymtech.net/), an incentivised mix-network system. The design is based on new techniques in the context of mix-nets as well as it suitably adapts concepts first developed in the context of blockchain protocols, and offers an incentive-driven privacy preserving communication infrastructure that aims to provide privacy via a novel “cryptoeconomic” mechanism.

RECORDING : Please note, this event will be recorded and will be available after the event for an indeterminate period under a CC BY -NC-ND license. Audience members should bear this in mind before joining the webinar or asking questions.

This talk is part of the Computer Laboratory Security Seminar series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Cambridge talks
• Computer Laboratory Security Seminar
• Department of Computer Science and Technology talks and seminars
• Interested Talks
• School of Technology
• Security-related talks
• Trust & Technology Initiative - interesting events
• Webinar - link in abstract
• bld31

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.