Meet Diego Aranha from #TeamConcordium Brazil

Published in

Concordium

4 min readFeb 3, 2020

Team Concordium brings together outstanding researchers, software engineers and business leaders from all over the world and we are proud to introduce them to the rest of our community. Today we would like you to meet Diego Aranha.

Who are you?

I’m Diego Aranha, yes like spider in Portuguese, but unlike Spiderman, the only thing I can save is software processing cycles 😂

I’m originally from Brazil, where I held a tenured position after working for almost 7 years as Assistant Professor at two universities. In Brazil, I am mostly known for explorig software vulnerabilities in the voting system during controlled tests organized by the national electoral authority. I moved to Denmark with my family in July 2018, after realizing Brazil was about to start a downward spiral towards oblivion.

Now, I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering at Aarhus University, where I am also affiliated with #COBRA. My background is in Computer Science, where I conduct research in how to design, implement and deploy cryptographic mechanisms efficiently and securely.

I like both breaking and building technology, but lately I’ve been focused more on the building aspect, as breaking stuff does not make many friends.

How did you get involved in the blockchain world?

Until recently, I was somewhat of a blockchain skeptic, especially after seeing the many completely misguided attempts of suggesting blockchains for solving fundamental problems in elections. I progressively changed my stance about blockchains (except for voting) after getting involved in Concordium.

The main reason behind this is the scientific approach taken by the project as one of its core values. Blockchains also renewed interest in pairing-based crypography, which was my PhD subject and main research topic for many years.

How can the world benefit from Blockchain?

Decentralizing trust when keeping transactions involving digital assets. As the COBRA Director Jesper likes to put it, blockchains open the Pandora Box of “programmable money”, hence the potential of impacting multiple markets is huge. I think it will take longer for blockchains to successfully be applied for tracking/trading/manipulating physical-world objects, but markets involving digital assets are certainly up for grabs in the short term. By digital assets, I’m referring not only to cryptocurrencies, but also energy trading, e-government and entertainment involving multimedia and gaming.

What would you like to see blockchain doing in the future?

Not in elections! 😂

More seriously, I would particularly like to see blockchain projects deploying stacks of end-to-end formally verified cryptographic toolchains for increased assurance.

Why are you interested in Concordium?

Blockchain technology is a wonderful playground for deploying advanced cryptographic techniques, such as zero-knowledge proofs and multi-party computation. However, the attack surface is much larger than usual, since the whole infrastructure becomes immediately accessible by malicious actors. This means the level of rigor in designing and analyzing such systems before deployment is absolutely high, and resembles requirements from other technologies with high societal impact such as electronic elections. The scientific approach adopted by Concordium stands out among the myriad of different projects out there and will surely pay off in the longer term. At COBRA, I’m working with Bas Spitters on formally verified implementations of cryptography to prevent subtle bugs in the cryptographic components of the infrastructure.

If you could describe Concordium in 2 words, which ones would it be?

Science-based!

Why should everyone follow closely Concordium’s journey?

Concordium is paving the way to new blockchain projects based on sound scientific principles and solid engineering. The technical team, board and management behind the project are incredible and bring together numerous actors with great expertise in critical aspects of its success, from meeting regulatory requirements in the financial world to deploying cryptographic mechanisms in a very hostile playing field.