PhD student wins elevator pitch competition

Jonathan Bootle wins the PhD student elevator pitch competition at the annual ACE-CSR conference.

UCL is among thirteen UK universities that have been recognized as Academic Centres of Excellence in cyber security research by GCHQ and EPSRC. At the annual conference for the ACE-CSRs, UCL PhD student Jonathan Bootle presented joint work with Andrea Cerulli, Pyrros Chaidos, Jens Groth and Christophe Petit on space-efficient zero-knowledge proofs, which was published earlier this year at the internationally leading cryptography conference EUROCRYPT 2016.

The main contribution is a protocol that enables a prover to convince a verifier that a statement is true without revealing any underpinning confidential information. The zero-knowledge proof consumes very little space, even for very large and complex statements that take many gigabytes to describe the protocol communicates less than seven kilobytes!