Wei Dai

I am (1) a PhD candidate in the Computer Science department at UC San Diego, advised by Mihir Bellare, currently on leave, and defending my dissertation in November 2021; (2) a cryptographer at Heliax, helping to build Anoma.

Research interest: design and analysis of cryptographic protocols, especially regarding security, scalability and privacy of blockchains and their applications.

Disclaimer regarding name collisions: I am not the author of Crypto++, who is also associated with Bitcoin and b-money, nor am I working at Microsoft Research.

Recent Professional Bio

In December 2015, I graduated from the College of Creative Studies with B.S. in Computer Science and B.S. in Mathematics. In September 2016, I received my Master degree in Computer Science at UCSB, advised by Stefano Tessaro. I have held numerous short-term internship positions during my PhD. From June to September 2018, I interned at Visa Research, working with Atul Luykx. From June to September 2019, I visited University of Washington, working with Stefano Tessaro. From June to October of 2021, I interned at NTT Research, under the supervision of Tatsuaki Okamoto and Go Yamamoto. I will be defending my PhD dissertation in November of 2021.

Preprints

  1. Flexible Anonymous Transactions (FLAX): Towards Privacy-Preserving and Composable Decentralized Finance (ePrint)

    Wei Dai.

Publications

(Authors are listed alphabetically.)

  1. Chain Reductions for Multi-Signatures and the HBMS Scheme (ePrint)

    Mihir Bellare and Wei Dai. To appear in ASIACRYPT 2021.

  2. The Multi-Base Discrete Logarithm Problem: Tight Reductions and Non-Rewinding Proofs for Schnorr Identification and Signatures (ePrint, doi)

    Mihir Bellare and Wei Dai. INDOCRYPT 2020.

  3. Super-Linear Time-Memory Trade-Offs for Symmetric Encryption (ePrint, doi)

    Wei Dai, Stefano Tessaro, and Xihu Zhang. TCC 2020.

  4. Reimagining Secret Sharing: Creating a Safer and More Versatile Primitive by Adding Authenticity, Correcting Errors, and Reducing Randomness Requirements (ePrint, doi)

    Mihir Bellare, Wei Dai, and Phillip Rogaway. PETS 2020.

  5. The Local Forking Lemma and its Application to Deterministic Encryption (ePrint, doi)

    Mihir Bellare, Wei Dai, and Lucy Li. Asiacrypt 2019.

  6. Defending Against Key Exfiltration: Efficiency Improvements for Big-Key Cryptography via Large-Alphabet Subkey Prediction (ePrint, doi)

    Mihir Bellare and Wei Dai. ACM CCS 2017.

  7. Information-Theoretic Indistinguishability via the Chi-Squared Method (ePrint, doi)

    Wei Dai, Viet Tung Hoang, and Stefano Tessaro. CRYPTO 2017.

Theses

  1. Statistical Methods in Cryptography (pdf)

    Master Thesis. College of Engineering, Unviersity of California Santa Barbara, Jun. 2016.

  2. Randomness Extractors - An Exposition (pdf)

    Senior Thesis. College of Creative Studies, University of California Santa Barbara, Oct. 2015. Also published in Rose-Hulman Undergraduate Math Journal (pdf). Vol. 17, Issue 1, 2016.