Pedro Moreno-Sánchez from IMDEA Software Institute will give a life talk on Friday, October 7 at 3 pm in the Salon.
If you would like to attend, please email to office@csh.ac.at.
Title: “Privacy-preserving blockchain applications with adaptor signatures”
Abstract:
Adaptor signatures are an extension of standard digital signatures that tie together the creation of a digital signature (e.g., authorising a blockchain transaction) and the leakage of a secret value (e.g., the pre-image of a hash value as in hash-time lock contracts). In a nutshell, one can first generate a pre-signature with respect to a secret value, which can be converted to a valid signature only by knowing the secret. Second, if the pre-signature is converted to a valid signature, one can extract the secret from the pair (pre-signature, valid signature). In this talk, we will overview the notion of adaptor signatures and how these two properties can be used as building block for several blockchain applications (e.g., atomic coin/token swaps or multi-hop payments) that provide strong privacy and scalability guarantees.
About:
Pedro received his PhD degree in Computer Science from Purdue University (USA) in 2018. Prior to joining the IMDEA Software Institute in October 2020, Pedro held a postdoctoral position at Technical University of Vienna (Austria) and he was also a visiting student at Ripple Labs (USA), IBM-Research Zurich (Switzerland) and Philips Research Europe (The Netherlands). Pedro’s main research interest lies in the areas of distributed ledgers (blockchain), privacy-enhancing technologies and applied cryptography. His research aims to bridge the gap between theory and practice and design cryptographic protocols with formal security and privacy guarantees that are practical and can help users today.