Aravind Thyagarajan - Cryptographic Locks For Cryptocurrency Payments [2 Nov 2022]

This talk is part of the CrySP Speaker Series on Privacy. For more information and to view other talks in the series, go to: https://crysp.uwaterloo.ca/speakers/

Cryptographic Locks For Cryptocurrency Payments

Sri AravindaKrishnan (Aravind) Thyagarajan, NTT Research
November 2, 2022

Abstract:
Blockchains and their popular application of cryptocurrencies have
revolutionized the payment infrastructure of the world. Users can now
make trustless payments among each other without having to worry about
extensive fees or hurdles. The technology has also given rise to more
complex financial systems, referred to as Decentralized Finance (DeFi)
systems. What has followed is the entry of numerous cryptocurrencies or
DeFi systems as they are referred to, into the blockchain application
space.

A natural question that arises is how do these different systems
co-exist with each other. For example, a user of one cryptocurrency may
want to make payments to another user who accepts tokens of a different
cryptocurrency. Or, a user may want to exchange a token of one
cryptocurrency with a token of another cryptocurrency. Such scenarios
are trivial with centralized trusts like banks and exchange services,
but require complex solutions in the blockchain setting which suffer
from numerous security, privacy and cost issues. In this talk, we will
see payment protocols to the above two scenarios that instead have
better efficiency, sots, scalability, user-privacy and interoperability
compared to existing solutions. The protocols make use of new
cryptographic techniques in combination with new payment techniques to
achieve these guarantees. By doing so, these protocols address several
fundamental questions concerning the theoretical foundation and
practical development of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies.

Bio:
Sri AravindaKrishnan Thyagarajan (Aravind) is currently a Postdoc at NTT
Research and was formerly a Postdoc at CMU with Elaine Shi. His primary
research interest is in applied cryptography where he works on problems
related to "cryptography meets game-theory” in applications like
blockchains, security and privacy of payment applications in
cryptocurrencies and fairness in multi-party computation. He completed
his PhD in Computer Science at University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
with Dominique Schröder in 2021 and Masters at Saarland University,
Germany in 2016.