Together with MAKI and the Research Training Group Privacy & Trust, we cordially invite you to the Ruzena Bajcsy Lecture on Communications and Resilience and the award ceremony of the Female Student Travel Award 2021 on July 15 from 4:15 pm and 5:15 pm. Zoom-Link

Ruzena Bajcsy Lecture

Here Prof. Stefanie Roos from TU Delft will give a talk on “Good Routing Protocols Should Be Like Ninjas: Untraceable and Fast” starting at 4:15 pm.

Prof. Roos’ research focuses on trade-offs between privacy, security and performance in decentralized systems. She contributed to the censorship-resistant P2P network Freenet and designed SpeedyMurmurs, a routing algorithm for payment channel networks like Lightning. Her current research is focused on improving layer2 protocols for blockchains as well as designing more efficient anonymity systems.

Routing data anonymous is important whenever sender and receiver should not be linked, such as a whistleblower and a journalist or a victim of domestic violence and a police officer. But anonymous data can also be important for companies, for example, when competitors should not know from which suppliers raw materials for a new product are purchased.

Networks like Tor can be used to establish anonymous (transport-layer) connections between different parties. However, there are scenarios where opening such connections is not possible, too time-consuming or too costly. Therefore, novel routing protocols are needed.

In her talk, Prof. Roos will show how dynamic network coordinates can facilitate efficient routing and how the anonymity of routing protocols can be improved. She will also draw a comparison to Tor-like systems and, overall, highlight the importance of payment channel networks for blockchain scalability and hence the broad adoption of blockchain.

Presentation of the Female Student Travel Award 2021

Following the talk, the Female Student Travel Award 2021 from emergenCITY, MAKI, CROSSING, and the RTG Privacy & Trust will be presented to our six awardees at 5:15 pm. The award recognizes outstanding female students in computer science, electrical engineering, and information technology. To compensate for missed travel to international conferences this year, the female students will receive a prize money and the opportunity to attend an (online) conference. We are already looking forward to announcing the award winners.