*********************************
There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
*********************************
Atlanta, GA | Posted: June 22, 2020
Tess Malone, Communications Officer
Summary Sentence:
Professor Alexandra Boldyreva has won a Test of Time Award from the International Conference on Practice and Theory in Public Key Cryptography (PKC) for her work on new multi-user digital signatures.
Full Summary:
No summary paragraph submitted.
Sasha Boldyreva compressedProfessor Alexandra Boldyreva has won a Test of Time Award from the International Conference on Practice and Theory in Public Key Cryptography (PKC) for her work on new multi-user digital signatures.
Boldyreva, who is a professor and associate chair in the School of Computer Science, wrote the single-author winning paper, Threshold Signatures, Multisignatures and Blind Signatures Based on the Gap-Diffie-Hellman-Group Signature Scheme, in 2003 as a Ph.D. student at the University of California San Diego.
“My advisor had to convince me to write the paper because I thought the results were too simple to deserve a publication,” Boldyreva said. “Of course, back then I would have never believed that the paper would do so well.”
Her new multi-user digital signature schemes were simpler and more efficient than existing schemes at the time. One of the most useful was a multisignature that allows a number of users to jointly digitally sign the same message while keeping the final signature as short and computationally efficient as a single signature. In effect, the length of the multisignature doesn’t grow as more users sign.
Secure networking protocols as well as blockchains and cryptocurrencies commonly rely on efficient multi-user signatures. Yet, at the same time, the schemes Boldyreva created are still simple enough that introductory cryptography courses teach them.
Boldyreva gave a five-minute presentation on the paper at this year’s virtually held PKC.
“Now, I’m certain that simplicity is a big advantage as long as the result is useful or interesting.”
