D340, Levine Research Science Building,
Duke University, Durham NC 27708

News
[May 2022] Sarisht and Jannis present an incentive compatible HTLC protocol called He-HTLC.
[Mar 2022] Our work on empirically analyzing the effects of EIP-1559 has been accepted at ACM CCS 2022. Here’s a blog post explaining our key results. [Mar 2022] Chenghong’s work together with Johes and Ashwin on an outsourced database using MPC and differential privacy, IncShrink, has been accepted in SIGMOD 2022.
[Feb 2022] Adithya and Nibesh’s work on OptRand, and optimistically responsive randomness beacon, (together with Aniket) is up on eprint.
[Jan 2022] New work with William, Yuxuan, Luyao, Fan, and Yulin on empirically analyzing Ethereum EIP-1559.
[Jan 2022] Nibesh’s work on synchronous distributed key generation (together with Adithya and Aniket) is up on eprint.
[Dec 2021] Nibesh’s work on good-case latency of rotating leader BFT protocols (together with Ittai) won the Best Paper Award at OPODIS 2021.
[Dec 2021] A blog post explaining the good-case latency of a rotating leader BFT protocol together with Nibesh and Ittai.
[Nov 2021] BFT Protocol Forensics paper is recognized as a Best Paper Runner Up at ACM CCS 2021.
[Oct 2021] What is the intuition behind Nakamoto consensus? How does proof-of-work relate to it? How does network synchrony play a role in its security? Learn more about it through this recent post on Decentralized Thoughts.
[Oct 2021] New work with Amey, Chen-Da, and Julian on adaptively secure communication efficient BFT for long messages is up on print.
Research
I am generally interested in applied cryptography and blockchains. I am currently focusing on two research topics:
1. Robust and efficient design of blockchain protocols.
2. Efficient privacy-preserving computation.
Teaching
Spring ’22: Computer Security (CompSci 351-S22)
Past classes:
Fall’20, Fall’21: Computer Security (CompSci 351-F20, CompSci 351-F21)
Fall’19, Fall’21: Blockchain Consensus (CompSci 590-F19, CompSci 590-F21)
Spring’21: Applied Cryptography (CompSci 590-03)
I'm looking for students
I am always looking for highly motivated Ph.D. students. If you are interested in working on any of these topics, then: