Eran Tromer Honored with the Test of Time Award at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) 2024
Eran Tromer, a BU expert in cryptography and information security and faculty affiliate of Hariri Institute, received a Test of Time Award at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) 2024 for his co-authored paper 2014 paper titled “Zerocash: Decentralized Payments from Bitcoin.”
S&P is IEEE’s top publication venue for information security research, and widely considered the field’s top venue overall. The Test of Time Award recognizes papers published at S&P that have made a lasting impact on the field. This year’s award was given to two papers that were published at S&P from 2012 through 2014 to recognize their broad and lasting impact on both research and practice in computer security and privacy.
Tromer’s Zerocash paper was recognized “for its continuous influence not just on cryptocurrency, but also on cryptography as a whole, by providing […] an actual example for how to use zk-SNARKs in practice”. The paper was the first to introduce strong privacy guarantees to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, and forms the basis for today’s privacy-preserving blockchains.
The paper showed how Zerocash could address an inherent weakness of Bitcoin whereby every user’s payment history was recorded in public view on the block chain, and thus were readily available to anyone. To protect user transaction privacy, Zerocash introduced a privacy-preserving, decentralized protocol for representing and transferring assets (blockchain-based payments) based on zero-knowledge SNARK proofs. This allowed people to pay each other privately even when everything on the blockchain was public. The Zerocash paper and its deployment were their first real-world application of zero-knowledge SNARK proofs.
“Zerocash: Decentralized Payments from Bitcoin” has been cited over 2,400 times. The accompanying academic prototype has developed and deployed as the Zcash cryptocurrency and, subsequently, variants have been adopted and employed by hundreds of blockchain projects and companies worldwide.
Eran Tromer is a professor at Boston University’s computer science department and Questrom School of Business. His research studies ways to build robust distributed computer systems that ensure privacy and integrity, using cryptographic tools such zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption. He also studies the resilience of computing platforms to data theft and tampering, such as side-channel attacks at the physical and software levels.
Tromer was a professor at Tel Aviv University when the paper was published. Co-authors on the paper are Eli Ben-Sassoon, co-founder and CEO of Starkware; Alessandro Chiesa, professor of computer science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL); Christina Garman, assistant professor of computer science at Purdue University; Matthew Green, associate professor of computer science, John Hopkins University; Ian Miers, assistant professor of computer science at the University of Maryland; and Madars Virza, research scientist at MIT Media Lab.