Computer science doctoral student Yuhao Dong, master’s student Woojung Kim, along with their supervisor Professor Raouf Boutaba, have received the best student paper award at Blockchain-2018, the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain.
L to R: Computer science PhD student Yuhao Dong and Professor Raouf Boutaba
Their paper, titled “Conifer: Centrally-managed PKI with blockchain-rooted trust,” describes a new blockchain-based public key infrastructure that allows users to communicate securely over intrinsically insecure networks such as the Internet. Their research was presented at Blockchain-2018, a conference held in Halifax, Nova Scotia from July 30 to August 3, 2018.
“Congratulations to Yuhao, Woojung and Raouf for receiving the prestigious best student paper award at Blockchain-2018,” said Dan Brown, Director of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science.
“Their paper describes a novel public key infrastructure — which they call Conifer — that has both centralized control and blockchain-backed trust. Their experimental results show that Conifer performs significantly better than other blockchain-based systems, with faster lookup and dramatically reduced storage overhead. Scalability is so important for blockchain-based systems, and they show that relative to traditional centralized public key infrastructures, their new system scales easily with negligible performance penalty.”
To learn more about this research, please see Yuhao Dong, Woojung Kim and Raouf Boutaba, Conifer: Centrally-managed PKI with blockchain-rooted trust, presented at the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain, Halifax, NS, July 30–August 3, 2018.