Section: Application Domains

Application Domain: blockchains

Participants : Daniel Augot, Sarah Bordage, Matthieu Rambaud, Lucas Benmouffok, Hanna-Mae Bisserier.

The huge interest shown by companies for blockchains and cryptocurrencies have attracted the attention of mainstream industries for new, advanced uses of cryptographic, beyond confidentiality, integrity and authentication. In particular, zero-knowledge proofs, computation with encrypted data, etc, are now revealing their potential in the blockchain context. Team Grace is investigating two topics in these areas: secure multiparty computation and so-called “STARKS”.

Secure multiparty computation enables several participants to compute a common function of data they each secretly own, without each participant revealing his data to the other participants. This area has seen great progress in recent years, and the cryptogaphic protocols are now mature enough for practical use. This topic is new to project-team Grace, and we will investigate it in the context of blockchains, through the lenses of use for private “smart contracts”. A PhD student has been hired since October, funded by IRT System-X.

Daniel Augot is involved in blockchains from the point of view of cryptography for better blockchains, mainly for improving privacy. A PhD student has been enrolled at IRT System-X, to study pratical use cases of Secure Multiparty Computaiton.

Also Daniel Augot, together with Julian Prat (economist, ENSAE), is leading a Polytechnique teaching and research “chair”, funded by CapGemini, for blockchains in the industry, B2B platforms, supply chains, etc.