Caregie Mellon’s Goyal spent seven years at Microsoft Research in India, where he was working on new kinds of cloud encryption, before hopping to academia in January.
He recently helped start the CMU Crypto group, an effort to lure graduate students and visiting faculty with an expertise in cryptography to take on research projects. The other full-time professor in the group is Manuel Bloom, who won the Turing Award in 1995 for his work in cryptography.
Goyal said he likes to imagine many forms of data that could be stored and transferred on blockchain. The first two generations of blockchain, he said, were centered around bitcoin and ethereum, but the technology is poised to move well beyond finance and money.
“The big question in my mind is, ‘Can blockchain and cryptocurrencies replace the cloud completely?'” he said.
Boneh and Goyal both said that the explosive growth of cryptocurrencies and the prices of bitcoin and ethereum are luring many students to the field and to, in some cases, start their own projects.