Project Grant 2240976

This three-year, $599,955 National Science Foundation project grant supports research into efficient trustless distributed cryptography at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The grantee will study fundamental problems in distributed cryptography such as reliable broadcast, Byzantine fault tolerant consensus, verifiable information dispersal, and distributed randomness beacons. For each problem, the goal is to design new solutions that do not rely on central trust and can match the efficiency of trusted counterparts. The project also aims to develop practical distributed key generation and setup protocols to remove central trust from existing distributed cryptographic protocols. This work falls under the NSF's Computer and Information Science and Engineering program (CFDA 47.070), which supports investigator-initiated research and education across computing and information science and engineering.