drwx.org

Mephic stalwartly guards the home page of Thomas Kerber

Research

• PhD Thesis
  The culmination of three and a half years of work on privacy.
• Composition with Knowledge Assumptions
  A theoretical work demonstrating how to composably use knowledge assumptions in security proofs, driven by the inability to use them in frameworks such as Universal Composition and Constructive Cryptography. Published in the proceedings of the 2021 International Cryptology Conference.
• Pistis
  Pistis (“faith”), demonstrates how to securly generate updateable structured reference strings in a distributed ledger, by requiring miners to perform updates for an initial setup period. Pistis is published (under the title “Mining for Privacy”) in the proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security.
• Kachina
  Kachina is a research project for constructing privacy-preserving smart contracts using just zero-knowledge. Kachina is published in the proceedings of the 2021 IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium.
• Ouroboros Crypsinous
  Ouroboros Crypsinous is a privacy-preserving proof-of-stake protocol, allowing users to privaty spend coins while still participating in a proof-of-stake protocol. Crypsinous has been published in the proceedings of the 2019 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

Projects

• Goblin
  Goblin is a command-line extensible password manager with built in version control. It is built to be scriptable, prioritising a convenient front end, and a minimal “core” functionality.
• Troll
  A smart-card filesystem bruteforcing tool for PCSC compliant smart cards. Exhaustively finds all files on the smartcards filesystem, and extracts them.
• BSc Project
  A proof-of-concept implementation of an Ethereum soft-fork extension to utilise verifiable computation in contracts. The final year project for my BSc in Computer Science.