Research Scientist / CryptoLab
PhD in Computer Science, 2020 (expected)
University College London
Sarah is a research scientist with interests that lie at the intersection of Applied Cryptography, Distributed Systems, and Game Theory. During her PhD, she mostly worked on decentralized consensus protocols but also looked at other aspects of decentralized systems such as their governance.
Blockchain, Consensus
2021.2.9 / Talks
Protocol Labs Researcher Sarah Azouvi presents her research on Winkle, which protects any validator-based byzantine fault tolerant consensus mechanisms, such as those used in modern Proof-of-Stake blockchains, against long-range attacks where old validators’ signature keys get compromised.
2020.10.21 / Publications
Winkle protects any validator-based byzantine fault tolerant consensus mechanisms, such as those used in modern Proof-of-Stake blockchains, against long-range attacks where old validators’ signature keys get compromised. Winkle is a decentralized secondary layer of client-based validation, where a client includes a single additional field into a transaction that they sign: a hash of the previously sequenced block.
2020.3.3 / Publications
Cryptocurrencies have garnered much attention in recent years, both from the academic community and industry. One interesting aspect of cryptocurrencies is their explicit consideration of incentives at the protocol level, which has motivated a large body of work, yet many open problems still exist and current systems rarely deal with incentive related problems well.