Cyber-attacks leveraging single points of failure increasingly threaten digital privacy and
critical infrastructures. Distributed cryptographic systems counter these attacks on single points of failure by distributing trust and workload while ensuring privacy, security, and availability, even if a large fraction of machines are compromised. As cyber-attacks become more sophisticated and critical infrastructures evolve to meet modern requirements, it is increasingly crucial to design secure, robust, and scalable distributed cryptographic systems that account for modern adversarial capabilities, infrastructures, and emerging applications. In this talk, I will illustrate this by discussing the theory and practice of three distributed cryptographic systems: data dissemination, verifiable secret sharing, and distributed key generation. I will discuss their importance, protocol design, and the challenges we face while designing them to meet contemporary requirements such as high scalability, tolerance for long latency, heterogeneous security guarantees across machines, and realistic threat models. Finally, I will conclude with some interesting future research directions I plan to work on.

Biography

Sourav Das is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign (UIUC) where he is advised by Ling Ren. His research interests include security, applied cryptography and distributed computing, specifically building efficient distributed cryptographic systems that provide rigorous cryptographic security. He is a recipient of the Chainlink Labs PhD fellowship, a best paper runner’s up at ACM CCS 2021, and the Mavis Future Faculty fellow at UIUC. He received his bachelor’s degree from IIT Delhi, where his thesis “Scaling smart contracts in Proof-of-work Blockchains" won the best undergraduate thesis award in the department.