Publications

Note: Top-tier conferences and journals for their respective fields are indicated in bold font.

Peer reviewed papers:

• Elizabeth Crites, Alistair Stewart, A Plausible Attack on the Adaptive Security of Threshold Schnorr Signatures, CRYPTO 2025.
• Jeff Burdges, Elizabeth Crites, Handan Kılınç Alper, Alistair Stewart, Sergey Vasilyev, Sassafras and Semi-Anonymous Single Leader Election, ACNS 2025.
• Niclas Boehmer, Markus Brill, Alfonso Cevallos, Jonas Gehrlein, Luis Sánchez-Fernández, Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin, Approval-Based Committee Voting in Practice: A Case Study of (over-)Representation in the Polkadot Blockchain, AAAI 2024.
• Emanuele Giunta and Alistair Stewart, Unbiasable Verifiable Random Functions, EuroCrypt 2024.
• Gehrlein, J., Miebs, G., Brunelli, M., & Kadziński, M. (2023). An active preference learning approach to aid the selection of validators in blockchain environments. Omega, 118, 102869.
• Aleixo Sanchez, Alistair Stewart, Fatemeh Shirazi, Bridging sapling: Private cross-chain transfers, IEEE Crosschain Workshop (ICBC-CROSS) 2022.
• Handan Kılınç Alper and Alptekin Küpçü, Optimally Efficient Multi-party Fair Exchange and Fair Secure Multi-party Computation, ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security.
• Handan Kılınç Alper and Jeff Burdges, Two-Round Trip Schnorr Multi-signatures via Delinearized Witnesses, CRYPTO 2021.
• Handan Kılınç Alper and Alptekin Küpçü, Coin-based Multi-party Fair Exchange, ACNS 2021.
• Jeff Burdges and Luca de Feo, Delay Encryption, Eurocrypt 2021.
• Alfonso Cevallos and Alistair Stewart, A verifiably secure and proportional committee election rule, AFT 2021.
  • Available on Arxiv as Validator Election in Nominated Proof-of-Stake.

Working papers:

• Gehrlein, Jonas and Häfner, Samuel and Oechssler, Jörg, The Candle Auction in the Field and the Lab, preprint available at SSRN), January 23, 2025.
• Bhargav Nagaraja Bhatt, Fatemeh Shirazi, Ailstair Stewart, Trustless Bridges via Random Sampling Light Clients, in submission.
• Jeff Burdges, Alfonso Cevallos, Handan Kılınç Alper, Chen-Da Liu-Zhang, Fatemeh Shirazi, Alistair Stewart, Rob Habermeier, Robert Klotzner, Andronik Ordian,Efficient Execution Auditing for Blockchains under Byzantine Assumptions, preprint.
  • Paper was presented at SBC 2024, video.
• Jeff Burdges, Elizabeth Crites, Oana Ciobotaru, Handan Kılınç Alper, Alistair Stewart, Sergey Vasilyev, Ring Verifiable Random Functions and Zero-Knowledge Continuations, working paper.
  • This paper will be presented at ArcticCrypt 2025.
• Jeff Burdges, Oana Ciobotaru, Syed Lavasani, Alistair Stewart, Efficient Aggregatable BLS Signatures with Chaum-Pedersen Proofs, in submission.
• Oana Ciobotaru, Fatemeh Shirazi, Alistair Stewart, Sergey Vasilyev, Accountable Light Client Systems for PoS Blockchains, working paper.
• Alistair Stewart and Lefteris Kokoris Kogias, GRANDPA: A finality Gadget, working paper.

Online papers:

• Samuel Häfner and Alistair Stewart, Front-Running and Candle Auctions, online paper.
• Jeff Burdges, Alfonso Cevallos, Peter Czaban, Rob Habermeier, Syed Hosseini, Fabio Lama, Handan Kılınç Alper, Ximin Luo, Fatemeh Shirazi, Alistair Stewart, Gavin Wood, Overview of Polkadot and its Design Considerations, technical report, first version, 29 May 2020.
• Handan Kılınç Alper, Consensus on Clock in Universally Composable Timing Model, preprint, 2019.

Blog Posts:

• Jonas Gehrlein, Research Digest: A Recap on Candle Auctions, Polkadot Forum, February 2025.
• Jonas Gehrlein, Proposal for Adjusting Polkadot’s Inflation System: Reducing Issuance and Complexity, Polkadot Forum, July 2024.
• Jonas Gehrlein, Polkadot’s Economics: Tools to Shape the Forseeable Future, Polkadot Forum, June 2024.
• Fatemeh Shirazi, Elastic Scaling, Polkadot Forum, April 2024.
• Andrew Burger, XCMP(Cross-Chain Message Passing) Design Discussion, Polkadot Forum, April 2024.
• Jonas Gehrlein, Adjusting the current inflation model to sustain Treasury inflow, Polkadot Forum, July 2023.
• Jeff Burdges, Post Quantum Signatures, Polkadot Forum, July 2023.
• Syed Hosseini, APK Proofs By Hand and Sage, Medium May 2023
• Fatemeh Shirazi, Logan Saether, Alistair Stewart, Rob Habermeier, Gavin Wood, Polkadot’s Messaging Scheme, Medium, January 2020.
• Alfonso Cevallos, How Nominated Proof-of-Stake will work in Polkadot, Medium, April 2019.
• Fatemeh Shirazi, Jeffrey Burdges, Edward Thomson, and Ignasi Albero, Messaging Protocol Workshop Outcomes, Medium, February 2019.

Posters presented at conferences:

• Jeff Burdges, Handan Kılınç Alper, Alistair Stewart, Availability and Validity, Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC), February 2020.
• Jeff Burdges, "Assessing or incentivising correct mixing without authorities", Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC), February 2020.
• Alistair Stewart, "GRANDPA: A Finality Gadget", ACM Computer and Communications Security (CCS), November 2019.

Specification:

• Polkadot Protocol Specification