Alin Tomescu

Alin Tomescu is Research Scientist & Founding Team at Aptos Labs. My broad research interests are in cryptography and its practical applications. Currently, my main research focus is on efficiently storing authenticated dictionaries on disk, so as to remove the main bottleneck of block validation in blockchain systems. In general, I remain very interested in authenticated data structures, especially if based on more exotic primitives, such as constant-sized polynomial commitments. In the past, I’ve led research on anonymous cryptocurrencies, tree-based vector commitments, constant-sized vector commitments, threshold cryptography, Verkle trees, transparency logs, and append-only logs on top of Bitcoin. I’ve also helped with, but not led, research on aggregatable distributed key generation, share recovery for verifiable secret sharing, scalable Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) protocols, and oblivious file systems. Before joining Aptos Labs, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher and then a Research Scientist at VMware Research. Before VMware, I was a PhD student at MIT, becoming an applied cryptography researcher with Srini Devadas, my advisor. Before joining MIT, I was building tamper-proof clouds and end-to-end encrypted outsourced file storage at Private Machines.