February 16th, 2022 - The Algorand Foundation is partnering with the University of Maryland (UMD) to conduct research on the security of the Algorand protocol. This agreement is supported through the Algorand Foundation grant programme in the category research. The goal of the partnership is to provide formal definitions of security and rigorous security proofs for the core Algorand blockchain protocol.
Research at the University of Maryland will be led by Professor Jonathan Katz. “I am thrilled to partner with the Algorand Foundation on this project,” says Katz. “The Algorand protocol has several novel features that make proving security particularly challenging and therefore especially interesting.” Other members of the UMD research team include Erica Blum, a graduate student in computer science at the University of Maryland, and Julian Loss, a former postdoctoral researcher advised by Katz who is now an assistant professor at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security.
Dr. Jonathan Katz is a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 2002. A world-renowned expert in the fields of cryptography, privacy, and distributed computing, Katz is an IACR fellow and an ACM fellow.
The Algorand Foundation is committed to building a truly global blockchain ecosystem and our Grant and Development Award funding mechanisms have supported other education and research projects in academia such as the UF Blockchain Lab at the University of Florida and the Algorand Fintech Innovation Hub at the University of Cape Town.
If you are interested in submitting a project for support from the Algorand Foundation Grant programme, please apply here.
