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Kartik Nayak

Associate Professor of Computer Science
Computer Science
308 Research Drive, Durham, NC 27708

Overview


Research interests are security, applied cryptography, distributed computing and blockchains. Recent focus topics include robust and efficient design of blockchain protocols and efficient privacy-preserving computation.

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Associate Professor of Computer Science · 2025 - Present Computer Science, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

Recent Publications


Optimistic, Signature-Free Reliable Broadcast and Its Applications

Conference Ccs 2025 Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Sigsac Conference on Computer and Communications Security · November 22, 2025 Reliable broadcast (RBC) is a key primitive in fault-tolerant distributed systems, and improving its efficiency can benefit a wide range of applications. This work focuses on signature-free RBC protocols, which are particularly attractive due to their comp ... Full text Cite

Decentralization of Ethereum's Builder Market

Conference Proceedings IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy · January 1, 2025 Blockchains protect an ecosystem worth more than $500bn with strong security properties derived from the principle of decentralization. Is today's blockchain decentralized? In this paper, we empirically studied one of the least decentralized parts of Ether ... Full text Cite

Sailfish: Towards Improving the Latency of DAG-Based BFT

Conference Proceedings IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy · January 1, 2025 Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) based BFT protocols balance consensus efforts across different parties and maintain high throughput even when some designated parties fail. However, existing DAG-based BFT protocols exhibit long latency to commit decisions, pri ... Full text Cite
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Recent Grants


CAREER: Scalable Consensus Protocol Design with Accountability and Privacy under Practical Failure Models

ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by National Science Foundation · 2023 - 2028

Disentangling Transaction Privacy and Consensus in Ethereum

ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Ethereum Foundation · 2022 - 2027

Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: Quicksilver: a Write-oriented, Private, Outsourced Relational Database Management System

ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by National Science Foundation · 2020 - 2025

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Education, Training & Certifications


University of Maryland, College Park · 2018 Ph.D.

External Links


Website