Blockchains and Secure Computing Platforms

Abstract

Blockchains have been one of the breakthrough technologies of the past decade, with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin becoming worth hundreds of billions of dollars, due in part to being an open platform that anyone can write software for, “permissionless innovation”. So far, these have only been able to operate on *public* data, which is why they haven’t been adopted for healthcare, personal finance, and other tasks involving sensitive data. In this talk introduce two research directions for secure computing on confidential data, using multiparty computation cryptography (MPC) or trusted hardware (TEE), while retaining the benefits of open blockchains.

Biography

Andrew Miller is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in Electrical and Computer Engineering and affiliate in Computer Science. He is also an Associate Director of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3). His research interests are the intersection of programming languages, cryptography, and distributed computing, and recently focus on decentralized systems like blockchains and cryptocurrencies.