Here's the paper eprint.iacr.org/2026/395 that my student Jay @ezepze.bsky.social will present at #FC2026 this week. He will talk about how to make delegated payments on Bitcoin. A question relevant for the AI agentic future.
This was part of Jay's UG thesis.
Jay ( @ezepze.bsky.social ) will present the paper in St. Kitts #FC2026
🎉Congratulations to Aravind (@aravind16coiner.bsky.social), on being awarded an USD 25k grant by the SUI Foundation for "Sequential Conditional Payments Across Blockchains With Minimal Contracts"! #Blockchain
Shafi, being introduced by the Dean of Engineering, Hesham El Gamal
Fantastic talk by Shafi Goldwasser at #USyd, to a packed auditorium!
Our special Basser-SMRI Seminar with
@sydneycompsci.bsky.social
is now on YouTube:
Is Dijkstra’s Algorithm Optimal? — Robert Tarjan, Princeton University
youtu.be/Pc40q0JGdjc
Congratulations to @monsoon0.bsky.social, Geordie Williamson, @tillus.bsky.social, John Voight from the School of Mathematics at USyd, and the rest of the team, from other parts of university and beyond, for their ARC Centre of Excellence in Mathematics for Quantum Era Security and Trust!
ARC Centre of Excellence in Mathematics for Quantum Era Security and Trust. The ARC Centre of Excellence in Mathematics for Quantum Era Security and Trust (MathQuEST) strives to build critical expertise to protect against the expected breakdown of cybersecurity protocols on quantum computers and build trust in artifical intelligence. Deep, untapped reservoirs of mathematical problems and structures will be mined to establish complexity foundations for security and create accelerated methods for AI. MathQuEST will assemble leading researchers from diverse disciplines to deliver a mathematically trained, technologically agile workforce, ensuring Australia’s preparedness for grand challenges arising from future quantum computers with dual-use impact across agriculture, defence, health and industry.
Thrilled to be part of this new ARC Centre of Excellence, led by Prof. Nalini Joshi (@monsoon0.bsky.social) at #USyd: ARC Centre of Excellence in Mathematics for #Quantum Era Security and Trust (MathQUEST)!
As foreshadowed in a previous post, our preprint "Verification of Statistical Properties: Redefining the Possible" with Sam Polgar, @aravind16coiner.bsky.social, Aditya Vikram Singh and Joy Yang is up!
eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2025/...
Abstract. Secure coin-tossing is typically modeled as an input-less functionality, where parties with no private inputs jointly generate a fair coin. In the dishonest majority setting, however, a strongly fair coin-tossing protocol is impossible. To circumvent this barrier, recent work has adopted the weaker notion of game-theoretic fairness, where adversaries are rational parties with preferences for specific outcomes, seeking to bias the coin in their favor. Yet these preferences may encode secret information, making prior protocols that assume preferences are public, fundamentally incompatible with privacy. We initiate a comprehensive study of privacy-preserving game-theoretically fair coin-tossing, where the preferences of honest parties remain private. We propose a simulation-based security framework and a new ideal functionality that reconciles both preference-privacy and game-theoretic fairness. A key ingredient is a certifying authority that authenticates each party’s preference and publishes only aggregate statistics, preventing misreporting while hiding parties’ preferences. The functionality guarantees that every honest party receives an output: either a uniform coin; or, if an adversary deviates, a coin that strictly decreases the adversarial coalition’s expected utility. Within this framework, we construct a protocol realizing our ideal functionality under standard cryptographic assumptions that works for both binary and general m-sided coin-tossing. Our schemes tolerate the same optimal (or nearly optimal) corruption thresholds as the best known protocols with public preferences (Wu-Asharov-Shi, EUROCRYPT ’22; Thyagarajan-Wu-Soni, CRYPTO ’24). Technically, our protocols combine authenticated preferences with an anonymous communication layer that decouples identities from preference-dependent actions, together with a deviation-penalty mechanism that enforces game-theoretic fairness. Our work is the first to reconcile game-theoretic fairness with preference privacy, offering new definitional tools and efficient protocols for rational multi-party computation in dishonest majority settings.
Image showing part 2 of abstract.
Image showing part 3 of abstract.
Game-Theoretically Fair Distributed Coin Tossing With Private Preferences (Pedro Branco, Pratik Soni, Sri AravindaKrishnan Thyagarajan, Ke Wu) ia.cr/2025/2190
Forgot to say! Sam is a new PhD student co-advised by @aravind16coiner.bsky.social and myself. Joy is my PhD student. He's a pleasure to work with, he's awesome, and he's looking for postdocs! Aditya is a postdoc here. Equally awesome, equally a pleasure to work with, someone to keep an eye out for!
Yu Yao's project, "Causal Representation Learning for Controllable Text-To-Image Generation" (DE260101993) will "improve the controllability of existing text-to-image generation models", and "contribute to the development of more trustworthy, interpretable, and controllable #GenAI."
Xiang Zhang's project, "Practical Deep Learning for Physiological Time Series Analysis" (DE260101486) will pioneer practical deep learning methods that are consistently effective, even when faced with label scarcity, domain shift, and #explainability gaps" for physiological time series.
Liyi Zhou's project, "Advancing Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Software Exploit Generation" (DE260101642) will "develop an advanced AI system capable of autonomously detecting and exploiting software vulnerabilities, mirroring the reasoning of elite human hackers." @lzhou1110.bsky.social
🎉 Huge congratulations to our academics Liyi Zhou, Xiang Zhang, and Yu Yao, who were awarded a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) by the Australian Research Council!
We look forward to the amazing research this will enable them to conduct at #USyd! rms.arc.gov.au/RMS/Report/D...
Shh.. This picture is a candidate for "where's Nils" ZKP explainer. Where's wallee is outdated now.
A high priority for quantum computers. Come into existence, and figure out this tally!
ICMY: this December, the School of Computer Science at #USyd will host an absolutely incredible line-up of speakers, jointly with the SMRI (@sydmathinst.bsky.social) and the Faculty of Engineering!
🗓️ Mon 1: Bob Tarjan
🗓️ Tue 2: Moti Yung
🗓️ Wed 10: Shafi Goldwasser
Details and how to attend below! ↴
afternoon tea will be before the talk at 3pm :)
Reminder: we are hiring at #USyd! Multiple continuing (equiv. tenure-track) teaching and research positions: excellent candidates in all areas of #ComputerScience are encouraged to apply!
⏰ Deadline Dec 1: usyd.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/USYD_E...
This December, the Faculty of Engineering at #USyd is delighted to welcome Dr Moti Yung, who will speak at the Basser seminar series in our School. He will tell us about "Malicious Cryptography: beyond adhering to specifications in secure systems"
🕒 Tuesday, Dec 2
3:30—4:30pm
Congratulations! Very inspiring to all of us.
Dean's Lecture Series with Professor Shafi Goldwasser: Wednesday 10 December 2025 at the University of Sydney
This December, the Faculty of Engineering at #USyd is delighted to welcome Prof. Shafi Goldwasser, who will deliver a Dean's Lecture on "Constructing Trust: A Cryptographic Tool Kit!"
🕒 Wednesday, Dec 10
3:00—5:00pm
(includes lecture and networking)
⏰ Register by Dec 5 (link and location below)
Financial Cryptography
Final call for papers FC26
fc26.ifca.ai/cfp.html
Submission deadline: 20 September 2025
Conference:
2–6 March 2026
St. Kitts Marriott Resort
We had academic speakers like @ccanonne.github.io @vellosoraptor.bsky.social @jlizier.bsky.social , Anusha Withana and Zhiyong Wang
Our School has just organised the annual #ResearchShowcase, where our academics, PhD, and Master's (by research) students presented their research with an interdisciplinary focus. 🎉🎉🎉
🎉 Clément and Yun's paper "Local Computation Algorithms for Knapsack: impossibility results, and how to avoid them" is accepted at RANDOM 2025! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2504.01543
🔗More about RANDOM: randomconference.com
👤
@ccanonne.github.io
#algorithms #sublinearalgorithms #distributedalgorithms
Applications are now open for our International Visitor Program, open to #mathematicians to visit Aus 🐨 between July '26-'June 27, or March '26-June -27 (Aus/NZ citizens)
📅 Apply by Aug 1, info:
mathematical-research-institute.sydney.edu.au/internationa...
Please share with your networks 🔁 #MathSky
Details, guidelines, and eligibility requirements:
🔗 Women in Engineering Scholarship:
www.sydney.edu.au/scholarships...
🔗 Women in Engineering Excellence:
www.sydney.edu.au/scholarships...
Please spread the word! #WomenInEngineering #WomenInSTEM #WomenInComputerScience #USyd
