Mahimna Kelkar, Cornell University - Breaking Omertà: On Threshold Cryptography, Smart Collusion, and Whistleblowing

[Yale Applied Cryptography Laboratory]

Join us for this week's talk!

• Mahimna Kelkar, Cornell University - Breaking Omertà: On Threshold Cryptography, Smart Collusion, and Whistleblowing
• Abstract: Cryptographic protocols often make honesty assumptions---e.g., fewer than $t$ out of $n$ participants are adversarial. In practice, these assumptions can be hard to ensure, particularly given monetary incentives for participants to collude and deviate from the protocol. In this work, we explore combining techniques from cryptography and mechanism design to discourage collusion. We formalize protocols in which colluders submit a cryptographic proof to whistleblow against their co-conspirators, revealing the dishonest behavior publicly. We provide general results on the cryptographic feasibility and show how whistleblowing fits a number of applications including secret sharing, randomness beacons, and anonymous credentials. We also introduce smart collusion---a new model for players to collude. Analogous to blockchain smart contracts, smart collusion allows colluding parties to arbitrarily coordinate and impose penalties on defectors (e.g., those that blow the whistle). We show that unconditional security is impossible against smart colluders even when whistleblowing is anonymous and can identify all colluding players. On the positive side, we construct a whistleblowing protocol that requires only a small deposit and can protect against smart collusion even with roughly $t$ times larger deposit.
• Link: https://ia.cr/2025/1582
• Bio: Mahimna Kelkar is a CS postdoc at Columbia University affiliated with the Columbia-Ethereum Research Center. His research interests are broadly in applied cryptography, and the foundations of security for blockchains. He recently completed his PhD at Cornell University advised by Ari Juels. In Fall 2026, he will start as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University.
• Livestream: https://yale.zoom.us/j/99405439112?pwd=dCSaehviaCda3alDcuy5llDkZIKC8x.1