Web3 Summit

Robert Kiel

Robert Kiel is a decentralised application developer at Validity Labs AG. He obtained his BSc in Computer Science Technical University Darmstadt in Germany in 2016. He wrote his theses in Concurrent Oblivious RAM (Security Engineering). Oblivious RAM is a technique to hide provably the access pattern on a random access memory. Unfortunately, these construction are not yet applicable due to their bad efficiency. The goal of this was to check whether these schemes are parallelizable. The result was a parallelisation of Path ORAM.

Robert obtained his masters degree in IT-Security Technical University Darmstadt in Germany in 2018. He wrote his master thesis in Zero-Knowledge Contingent Payments (Smart contracts on Bitcoin). It has been shown that the Fair Exchange Problem is unsolvable without the help of a trusted third party. Newer research has shown that it is possible to use blockchains like Bitcoin as such a trusted third party. The work showed that the given protocol had not only a security issue, but also fundamental fairness problems. The result was a secure protocol for Bitcoin Script that does not rely on zkSNARKs and does not suffer from the fairness problems.