Deepak Maram | Cornell University
I am broadly interested in computer security and applied cryptography. My recent focus has largely been around decentralized identity. Some of the research highlights are below: - DECO is a privacy-preserving oracle protocol licensed from Cornell by Chainlink. CanDID is a Sybil-resitant decentralized identity system that builds on DECO to port legacy credentials. - GoAT is a file geolocation protocol useful to prove location of files. - ZkAttest is an anonymity layer on top of WebAuthn that came out of my research internship at Cloudflare.
Summary:
Deepak is working on verifiably proving geolocation of files, identities, and arbitrary computation. The current method to determine geographic location is through GPS or IP addresses, which can be spoofed. Having geo-distributed verifiers would be a great starting point, and the millions of geodistributed websites hosted by businesses all over the world seems like an untapped resource for solving this problem. Deepak is leveraging distributed timestamps from these servers to validate locations, and has built a demonstration of the mechanism.
