Keynote Speaker

Abstract: Cryptography plays a prominent role in today’s increasingly digital society. In fact, virtually all existing systems rely on cryptography at their core. Therefore, it is utterly important to build and analyze cryptographic protocols to secure real world systems. In this talk, I will share my vision for establishing secure and privacy-preserving blockchain applications through cryptographic protocols by showcasing examples of my work in the field. As an example, I will present our research on adaptor signatures, a novel cryptographic scheme that binds the creation of a digital signature to the knowledge of a cryptographic secret other than the signing key. In the realm of blockchain-based systems, the adaptor signatures scheme has become the building block for many blockchain applications proposed so far. In the second part of the talk, I will present illustrative examples of our research on adaptor signatures-based blockchain applications. Finally, I will conclude by highlighting my ongoing research efforts and future research directions.

Short biography: Pedro Moreno-Sanchez is an assistant professor at the IMDEA Software Institute (Spain) since October 2020. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Purdue University (USA) in 2018. Prior to joining the IMDEA Software Institute in October 2020, he held a postdoctoral position at Technical University of Vienna (Austria). During his PhD, he was also a visiting student at Ripple Labs (USA), IBM-Research Zurich (Switzerland). He received his bachelor and master degree from the University of Murcia (Spain).