Deepak Maram’s research while affiliated with Weill Cornell Medicine and other places

... The nascent literature on Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) has studied Byzantine (i.e., arbitrary adversarial) behavior in information elicitation systems, with a focus on setting limits on the fraction of the population that can be Byzantine, and assuming that the rest are unconditionally honest, without the consideration of any incentives (Sheng et al. 2024a;Maram et al. 2021;Sheng et al. 2024b). Our work here crucially differs in that we study the players' rational behavior according to utility functions. ...

Reference:

Incentive-Compatible Recovery from Manipulated Signals, with Applications to Decentralized Physical Infrastructure

... Decentralized identity is deemed to be a new paradigm for replacing traditional centralized identity governance, promoting a higher-level privacy-preserving and user-centric approach to authentication and authorization [5,12,31]. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has standardized and formalized Decentralized Identifier (DID) and Verifiable Credential (VC) for decentralized identity. Specifically, a DID uniquely identifies an entity's identity and supports proof of ownership of identity attribute data. ...

Reference:

SLVC-DIDA: Signature-less Verifiable Credential-based Issuer-hiding and Multi-party Authentication for Decentralized Identity

... This phenomenon is similar to committing big batches of 2f + 1 blocks. Finally, (3) since all certified blocks need to be signed by a supermajority of validators, signature generation and verification consume a large amount of CPU on each validator, which grows with the number of validators [17], [18]. This burden is particularly heavy for a crashrecovered validator that typically needs to verify thousands of signatures when trying to catch up with the rest. ...

Reference:

Mysticeti: Reaching the Latency Limits with Uncertified DAGs

... This allowed us to benchmark their performance differences effectively. Initially inspired by Cloudflare's concept of using hardware security keys (HSKs) for the attestation of personhood [11], further elaborated by Whalen et al. [12], our design aimed to replace CAPTCHAs with HSK-based signature validation. This concept evolved into ZKAttest by Faz-Hernández et al. [13], using sigma-protocol ZKPs to attest to personhood while preserving HSK certificate privacy. ...

Reference:

Evaluating the Efficiency of zk-SNARK, zk-STARK, and Bulletproof in Real-World Scenarios: A Benchmark Study

... Such a scheme considers a prover and a verifier, where the prover holds a valid signature σ issued by a keypair sk, vk, and the verifier holds a list R = {vk i } i∈[m] of all valid public verification keys, where vk ∈ R. Previous work has produced practical schemes for proving knowledge of ECDSA signatures (e.g. see ZKAttest [62] and CDLS [61]), noting their similarity to ring signatures [79], in particular. Similar approaches for other TLS-compliant signature schemes (e.g. based on RSA) exist [80], but do not appear to be practical for our application (though practical constructions would have immediate value for our work). ...

Reference:

DiStefano: Decentralized Infrastructure for Sharing Trusted Encrypted Facts and Nothing More

... Although initiatives like the W3C Decentralized Identifier Working Group seek to establish standards for decentralized identity [7,8], many proposed frameworks struggle to meet both technical and usability requirements. Recent efforts, such as CanDID, have made progress in areas like usable key recovery [66]. Building on concepts, such as, decentralized identifiers (DIDs), proof-of-personhood [49], anonymous credentials, and Personhood credentials (PHCs) have emerged as an alternative approach. ...

Reference:

Personhood Credentials: Human-Centered Design Recommendation Balancing Security, Usability, and Trust

... One widely recognized approach involves decentralized identifiers (DIDs). Emerging proposed systems, DECO [96], Town-Crier [95] exemplify this model where users authorize the release of personal credentials from user devices to websites for proving certain characteristics about themselves. Although initiatives like the W3C Decentralized Identifier Working Group seek to establish standards for decentralized identity [7,8], many proposed frameworks struggle to meet both technical and usability requirements. ...

Reference:

Personhood Credentials: Human-Centered Design Recommendation Balancing Security, Usability, and Trust