Find Your Fire …
Find Your Fire …
I have had a great research career, and reflecting back, my advice to any ECR (Early Career Researcher) is — to borrow from Steve Jobs — to do what you love and have a passion for. And, so, I teach the subject I love and I do research in the areas that I am most passionate about, and where I feel I can make a difference. And, to add to this, I’d say it's important to work with the companies and organisations that you respect most, and that have shared values and vision.
And, so, this week, we started a collaboration with one of the companies I respect so much: MIRACL [here]:
For me, it's like a car designer working with Audi. MIRACL, through the work of the mighty Michael Scott (the “S” in the Barreto-Lynn-Scott (BLS) curve — https://asecuritysite.com/bls/), has built the core of many of the methods that we currently use for building Zero Knowledge Proofs. These prove ways of proving things, without giving away your private information.
Building a trusted digital future
The work will aim to build a new generation of cryptography, and which will build the Internet as it should have been built — with a solid foundation of mathematical proofs and with strong linkages to these in the software engineering process. Call it Web 3 or whatever you want, it’s the route to a more trusted, private, and resilient digital world. PKI, https, and all the other sticking plaster approaches have done us well to patch the security of the Internet, we now have to do it properly.
As advice to an ECR, I’d say it is important to spot an amazing opportunity and grasp it. To me, a collaboration with MIRACL is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and will allow us to build on the knowledge of MIRACL and move forward with our vision of creating a more trusted, secure and privacy-respecting internet. That’s our passion. That is our lab. We focus on the citizen, and their rights, and enable things, rather than stop them. There are too many barriers and boundaries in our lives, and we need to break them down.
A bit of background
In the KTP project, our focus will be to develop a foundation to build products and services that MIRACL can take to the market and will hopefully secure the UK’s place as a world leader in cryptography and data encryption. These areas include copyright protection of content, data loss protection and supporting data processing of encrypted data.
Overall, Innovate UK supports the building of industry-academic partnerships, where knowledge can flow freely, and help to build new areas of our economy. For us, we have some cool technology to build with, including areas of Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) and Homomorphic Encryption.
And the maths
And, so, I can’t avoid the maths part. To me, MIRACL’s work in creating elliptic curve libraries and pairing-based cryptography provides an almost endless foundation for the investigation of new methods. If you are interested, here are some examples of using their code:
https://asecuritysite.com/miracl/
Conclusions
Go find your fire …