Greetings!

Since the last research update, IC3 researchers won a Best Paper Award at Crypto 2021, designed publicly auditable MPC-as-a-service, and more!
Join the 2021 DeFi MOOC (beginning August 26th, details in the "Community Developments" section).
Recordings from the 2021 IC3 Blockchain Camp are available on the IC3 YouTube channel!
AWARDS
The authors show that the only “gap” towards getting (infinitely-often) one-way functions (OWF) from the assumption that EXP ≠ BPP is the seemingly “minor” technical gap between two-sided error and errorless average-case hardness of the MKtP problem. As a corollary of this result, they additionally demonstrate that any reduction from errorless to two-sided error average-case hardness for MKtP implies (unconditionally) that NP ≠ P.
Yanyi Liu (Cornell) and Rafael Pass (Cornell Tech)
NEW RESEARCH
The authors design a simple yet efficient Asynchronous Data Dissemination (ADD) protocol for 𝑛 parties that is information theoretically secure, tolerates up to one-third malicious nodes, and has a communication cost of 𝑂(𝑛|𝑀|+ for replicating a message 𝑀. They then use this ADD protocol to improve many important primitives in cryptography and distributed computing.
Sourav Das, Zhuolun Xiang, and Ling Ren (all University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign)

The authors present an approach for compressing regular hash-based signatures using STARKs.
Irakliy Khaburzaniya, Konstantinos Chalkias, Kevin Lewi (all Novi / Facebook, USA), and Harjasleen Malvai (Cornell University / Novi / Facebook, USA)

The authors provide the first efficient construction for auditable MPC that has a one time universal setup.
Sanket Kanjalkar (Blockstream Research), Ye Zhang (New York University), Shreyas Gandlur (Princeton University), Andrew Miller (University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign)
COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENTS
Join the 2021 DeFi MOOC (beginning August 26th)!
IC3 Associate Director Andrew Miller (UIUC) and Faculty Member Dawn Song (Berkeley) will be among the instructors for a fall 2021 course about DeFi, which begins August 26th and is open to all! It will cover topics including DEXs, oracles, decentralized lending, and more. 
Learn more on the course website.
IC3 Alumnus Ethan Cecchetti will start as a Postdoc at the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2) in September. See the full announcement on the UMD website
Patrick McCorry wrote an explainer about sidechains and rollups. You can see more on this topic in his presentation from the 2021 IC3 Blockchain Camp (video here).
Please send any new research or presentations to sarahallen@cornell.edu to be included in the next research update.
 
Best wishes, 
Sarah Allen
IC3 Community Manager
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