We’ve all heard of Wi-Fi. It’s everywhere from the library to the airport, restaurants and more. But less well-known is DeFi, decentralized financial networks. A National Science Foundation grant is funding research at New Mexico State University to make these decentralized essential networks more secure.
Roopa Vishwanathan, NMSU associate computer science professor, is working on new ways to help create secure decentralized financial networks. Using these networks and the techniques that the project proposes to develop, users can maintain their anonymity as well while participating in secure financial transactions. It’s the culmination of work she and a group of students and collaborators have been doing over the last five years. A $600,000 NSF grant awarded in October will fund her research for the next three years.
“This is basically a project about scaling blockchains in a secure way,” Vishwanathan said. “It’s specifically about a mechanism called a ‘payment channel network’ that is a well-regarded and popular way of scaling blockchains.”
DeFi networks have two main problems: significant security vulnerabilities and a general lack of regulatory oversight and consumer protection. These platforms are highly susceptible to security risks, primarily due to the complex and often unaudited nature of their underlying technology, making them vulnerable to hackers or just mistakes by users.
Vishwanathan and her students aim to solve these problems. She has two Ph.D. students and one master’s student working with her on this research. She points out the DeFi industry is growing at an exponential rate, and these NMSU students are gaining critical experience that will make them attractive hires for DeFi companies.
Matheen Basha Shaik, who is graduating with his master’s degree in computer science in December, is eager to pursue further research in this area. “My research until now has focused on developing efficient and budget-aware frameworks for verifiable computation in smart grids to ensure trustworthiness and cost efficiency in data analytics tasks. As a next step, I plan to work on developing new cryptographic protocols that can be used across various application domains such as decentralized finance, smartgrids, etc.”
Kartick Kolachala, a Ph.D. student working with Vishwanathan, plans to pursue a career in higher education. “My research focuses on exploring the applications of cryptographic protocols for frameworks and systems that address the scalability challenges of Layer-2 protocols, especially payment channel networks (PCNs),” said Kolachala. “I have developed frameworks that enhance routing efficiency, liquidity utilization and path validation for PCNs. Of late, I have been working on building efficient and verifiable data structures for cloud storage systems. My long-term goal is to join academia and continue pursuing research in the areas of decentralized finance."
“We need to publish in the top-tier conferences and keep up with the latest research on the academic side, but that cannot be done in an isolated way,” Vishwanathan said. “We also have to keep up with what industry is doing, which is why it’s important to talk to industry partners that build payment channel networks. We engage with them to gain their perspective on the research challenges that we have identified.”
Vishwanathan expects this project to contribute to cybersecurity in other areas.
“Our goal has been to build cryptographic protocols that are of independent interest and could be used in a lot of applications,” Vishwanathan said. “It may be used for health care applications, maybe secure voting, maybe secure private information retrieval and database security beyond the scope of this project.”
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CUTLINE: Roopa Vishwanathan, New Mexico State University computer science associate professor (left), and her team are researching new ways to make decentralized financial networks safer. (NMSU photo by Josh Bachman)
CUTLINE: Vishwanathan’s team of New Mexico State University computer science students is being trained in cryptography that will make them marketable employees in DeFi industry. From left: Matheen Basha Shaik, Master of Science student in computer science; Zain Abubaker, Ph.D. student in computer science; Roopa Vishwanathan, NMSU associate computer science professor; and Kartick Kolachala, Ph.D. student in computer science. (NMSU photo by Josh Bachman)