Cryptographic mechanisms in distributed ledgers

This project considers various consensus protocol used in distributed ledger systems to assess their validity, and potential for use in other applications. One such application is in verifiable delay functions, where a solver will produce a sequential calculation resistant to parallelisation, to produce a time delay which can be efficiently verified as legitimate. This has applications such as decentralised public randomness, timestamping, and providing a tool for building resource-efficient blockchains. This latter property is particularly topical due to concerns about the sustainability of Bitcoin, which is known to use huge quantities of energy.
A particular research task in the project is the extension of VDFs to the multi-party setting, as this will allow inputs to be embedded by each party. This may provide further applications such as decentralised auctions, and the potential for use with an e-voting scheme to provide a proof of vote.

The most significant impact of the renewal of Royal Holloway's CDT in Cyber Security will be the production of at least 30 further PhD-level graduates. In view of the strong industry involvement in both the taught and research elements of the programme, CDT graduates are "industry-ready": through industry placements, they have exposure to real-world cyber security problems and working environments; because of the breadth of our taught programme, they gain exposure to cyber security in all its forms; through involvement of our industrial partners at all stages of the programme, the students are regularly exposed to the language and culture of industry. At the same time, they will continue to benefit from generic skills training, equipping them with a broad set of skills that will be of use in their subsequent workplaces (whether in academia, industry or government). They will also engage in PhD-level research projects that will lead to them developing deep topic-specific knowledge as well as general analytical skills.

One of the longer-term impacts of CDT research, expressed directly through research outputs, is to provide mechanisms that help to enhance confidence and trust in the on-line society for ordinary citizens, leading in turn to quality of life enhancement. CDT research has the potential of directly impacting the security of deployed system, for example helping to make the Internet a more secure place to do business. Moreover the work on the socio-technical dimensions of security and privacy also gives us the means to influence government policy to the betterment of society at large. Through the training component of the CDT, and subsequent engagement with industry, our PhD students are exposed to the widest set of cyber security issues and forced to think beyond the technical boundaries of their research. In this way, our CDT is training a generation of cyber security researchers who are equipped - philosophically as well as technically - to cope with whatever cyber security threats the future may bring. The programme equip students with skills that will enable them to understand, represent and solve complex engineering questions, skills that will have an impact in UK industry and academic long beyond the lifetime of the CDT.