Title: Towards Scalable Decentralized Systems
Abstract: Decentralized systems enable mutually distrusting parties to collaboratively control a system; this fosters trust as no single corrupted party can break the system, while utility is ensured through collective participation. In recent years, decentralized systems have found many applications, particularly within the blockchain ecosystem. Traditionally, the robustness and security of a decentralized system increase with the number of participating parties. Consequently, the primary objective of decentralization is to scale the system to accommodate as many parties as possible. However, the existing framework for realizing threshold cryptography, the core cryptographic primitive enabling decentralization, still relies on interactive setup processes, posing significant scalability challenges in real-world scenarios. Additionally, it lacks the flexibility to handle advanced features such as weights, dynamism, and multiverse, which are highly desired in practice. In this talk, Mingyuan Wang will discuss his research work that proposes new techniques to address these issues, which pave the way for truly scalable decentralized cryptographic systems. He will conclude the talk by briefly discussing other research problems that he is interested in.
Bio: Mingyuan Wang is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, hosted by Sanjam Garg. He received his PhD from Purdue University, where he was advised by Hemanta K. Maji. Wang is interested in cryptography and its interplay with theoretical computer science and security. His research covers a wide range of topics, including threshold cryptography, secure multiparty computation, leakage-resilient cryptography, and cryptographic applications in machine learning. His work has been published at top venues, such as Crypto, Eurocrypt, the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, the Theory of Cryptography Conference, the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, and more.