Greetings!

Since the last research update, IC3 researchers introduced a new distributed key generation protocol, studied privacy in the Lightning Network, contributed to the broader central bank digital currency discussion, and more!
CanDID is a practical, user-friendly realization of decentralized identity, which was created in partnership among IC3 researchers at Cornell, Cornell Tech, UIUC, and J.P. Morgan. CanDID issues credentials by drawing securely and privately on data from existing, unmodified web service providers, allowing for key recovery. It also protects against sybil attacks. 
Paper authors: Deepak Maram (Cornell Tech, IC3), Harjasleen Malvai (Cornell, IC3), Fan Zhang (Cornell Tech, IC3), Nerla Jean-Louis (UIUC, IC3), Alexander Frolov (Cornell, IC3), Tyler Kell (Cornell Tech, IC3), Tyrone Lobban (J.P. Morgan), Christine Moy (J.P. Morgan), Ari Juels (Cornell Tech, IC3), Andrew Miller (UIUC, IC3)
Blog: Medium
Paper: ePrint
CONFERENCE ACCEPTANCES
Summary: The authors identified 27,183 private channels, discovered hidden balances and showed how a passive adversary can infer payments' endpoints with very high probability.
George Kappos (UCL), Haaroon Yousaf (UCL), Ania Piotrowska (UCL, Nym Technologies), Sanket Kanjalkar (UIUC), Sergi Delgado-Segura (PISA Research), Andrew Miller (UIUC), Sarah Meiklejohn (UCL)

Summary: Calypso is the first truly decentralized data-management system that provides the full CIA triad and concurrently protects against front-running attacks. It is the final chapter of IC3 alumni Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias’s thesis and was awarded the 2020 Distinction by EPFL School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC). 
Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias (IST Austria, Novi), Enis Ceyhun Alp (EPFL), Linus Gasser (EPFL), Philipp Jovanovic (UCL), Ewa Syta (Trinity College), Bryan Ford (EPFL)
NEW RESEARCH
Summary: The authors present Safer Illinois, a system for decentralized health analytics supporting two applications currently deployed with widespread adoption: digital contact tracing and COVID-19 status cards. They also introduce the RokWall architecture for privacy-preserving centralized data analytics on sensitive user data. They discuss the architecture of these systems, design choices, threat models considered, and challenges.
Vikram Sharma Mailthody, James Wei, Nicholas Chen, Mohammad Behnia, Ruihao Yao, Qihao Wang, Vedant Agrawal, Churan He, Lijian Wang, Leihao Chen, Amit Agarwal, Edward Richter, Wen-Mei Hwu, Christopher W. Fletcher (All UIUC), Jinjun Xiong (C3SR, IBM Research), Andrew Miller (UIUC), Sanjay Patel (UIUC)
Summary: The authors introduce a distributed key generation (DKG) protocol with aggregatable and publicly-verifiable transcripts. It reduces the size of the final transcript and the time to verify it from O(n 2 ) to O(n log n), where "n" denotes the number of parties and leverages gossip rather than all-to-all communication to reduce verification and communication complexity. They experimentally evaluate the DKG and show that the perparty overheads scale linearly and are practical.
Kobi Gurkan (cLabs, Ethereum Foundation), Philipp Jovanovic (UCL), Mary Maller (Ethereum Foundation), Sarah Meiklejohn (UCL), Gilad Stern (Hebrew University), Alin Tomescu (VM Ware)

Summary: The authors investigate strengthened fault tolerance (SFT) in BFT SMR under partial synchrony, which provides gradually increased resilience guarantees (like Nakamoto Consensus) during an optimistic period when the network is synchronous and the number of Byzantine faults is small. The committed blocks can tolerate up to two-thirds corruptions even after the optimistic period. This solution maintains the linear message complexity of state-of-the-art BFT SMR protocols and requires only marginal bookkeeping overhead. They implement this solution over the open-source Diem project.
Zhuolun Xiang (Novi, UIUC), Dahlia Malkhi (Novi), Kartik Nayak (Duke), and Ling Ren (UIUC)
COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENTS
The IC3 report "Design choices for central bank digital currency: Policy and technical considerations" was mentioned in speeches about central bank digital currency by officials at the Bank of England and the Deutsche Bundesbank.
Report authors: Sarah Allen (IC3), Srdjan Capkun (ETH Zurich), Ittay Eyal (Technion), Giulia Fanti (CMU), Bryan Ford (EPFL), James Grimmelmann (Cornell Tech), Ari Juels (Cornell Tech), Kari Kostiainen (ETH Zurich), Sarah Meiklejohn (UCL), Andrew Miller (UIUC), Eswar Prasad (Cornell), Karl Wüst (ETH Zurich), and Fan Zhang (Cornell Tech)
Full Paper: Brookings
Blog Posts: Brookings and VoxEU
The Ethereum Foundation, an IC3 Partner, announced a partnership with Reddit to collaborate on scaling solutions necessary to launch large-scale applications, like the Reddit community points system, on Ethereum. 
Announcement: Reddit 
Press: Coindesk
Introducing gyroscope, a stablecoin design based on academic research, including IC3 collaboration and the winning project from the 2020 IC3 Blockchain Camp. Gyroscopic stablecoins use automated market maker (AMM) mechanisms in combination with gyroscopic buffers to maintain stability.
Litepaper by Ariah Klages-Mundt, Lewis Gudgeon and Daniel Perez: gyro.finance
IC3 Partners Fidelity and Novi now host public copies of the Bitcoin whitepaper.
FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES FOR IC3 STUDENTS
Postdoc
The Decentralized Distributed Systems (DEDIS) Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), which is led by IC3 faculty member Bryan Ford, is recruiting a postdoc with interest in systems security/privacy in general, and in decentralized and distributed systems in particular. Learn more and apply on Recruiting.EPFL. 
Please send any new research or presentations to [email protected] to be included in the next research update.
 
Best wishes, 
Sarah Allen
IC3 Community Manager
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