Speaker: Eysa Lee (Brown University)
Title: Digital Authentication: Distributed and Anonymous
The seminar will be available for in-person and Zoom participation. To participate online, please email inquiry-cs@barnard.edu to receive the Zoom link.
Digital authentication is a key primitive to ensure message integrity on the internet. Today, almost all important documents on the internet are signed, including personal messages, Github commits, software that you download from brew or apt, and the DNS name system. This talk will cover my recent work in enhancing the authentication primitive, namely methods to make authentication distributed and anonymous. I'll discuss my recent line of work on threshold signature schemes, culminating in the most performant threshold system for t-out-of-n-parties for the widely deployed Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) scheme. I will also discuss how these techniques can be used to distribute the issuing operation for anonymous credential systems based on BBS+. Finally, I will discuss how my work has influenced the European Commission's working group on digital identity, specifically by advocating for stronger privacy mechanisms in their proposed digital wallet standard. I'll end the talk with pictures of my fierce and incredibly clever adversaries, Ruby and Gertrude.
Eysa Lee is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Data Science Institute (DSI) at Brown University working with Anna Lysyanskaya. Her research focuses on practical cryptographic protocols, in particular digital credentials, signature schemes, and multiparty computation. Previously she earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science under the supervision of Abhi Shelat at Northeastern University and did her undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin.