Chen-Da Liu-Zhang

Professor, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU)

I am a cryptographer working on the security of distributed systems. I lead a group in cryptography and secure distributed systems at HSLU. My research builds secure multi-party computation, Byzantine consensus and blockchain protocols whose guarantees hold under the conditions real distributed systems impose, including unknown message delays, participants that join and leave, and adversaries that adapt over time.

Before joining HSLU in 2023 I was a Research Scientist at the Web3 Foundation (2023-2025, in parallel), a Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University and NTT Research with Vipul Goyal (2021-2023), and a Ph.D. student at ETH Zurich with Ueli Maurer (2016-2021).

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Selected publications

Velox: Scalable Fair Asynchronous MPC from Lightweight Cryptography. Bandarupalli, Ji, Kate, Liu-Zhang, Pollmann, Song. CCS 2025. Asynchronous MPC among hundreds of parties from hash functions alone; up to 36x lower latency than the prior best system.
Towards Achieving Asynchronous MPC with Linear Communication and Optimal Resilience. Goyal, Liu-Zhang, Song. CRYPTO 2024. Resolves a question open since the early 1990s: asynchronous MPC with linear communication at optimal resilience.
Always Have a Backup Plan: Fully Secure Synchronous MPC with Asynchronous Fallback. Blum, Liu-Zhang, Loss. CRYPTO 2020. Introduces network-agnostic security: one protocol with optimal guarantees whether or not the network is synchronous.
Round-Optimal Byzantine Agreement. Ghinea, Goyal, Liu-Zhang. EUROCRYPT 2022. First protocols matching the 1986 Karlin-Yao round lower bound.
Feasibility of Broadcast with Dynamic Committees. Dettling, Liu-Zhang, Masserova, Rambaud, Urban. CRYPTO 2026. When agreement is possible at all when the set of participants changes over time.

News

Oct 2026: Communication Depth in Multivalued Broadcast (with Gabriel Dettling and Martin Hirt) accepted at TCC 2026.
Sep 2026: Validity in Responsive Byzantine Agreement (with Diana Ghinea and Simon Holmgaard Kamp) accepted at DISC 2026.
2026: Feasibility of Broadcast with Dynamic Committees accepted at CRYPTO 2026.
2026: Information-Theoretic Optimistic Verifiable Secret Sharing (with Martin Hirt and Emanuele Marsicano) accepted at PODC 2026.
2026: Four papers accepted at EUROCRYPT 2026, on round-optimal Byzantine agreement without setup, statistical coin tossing and game theory, and two on network-agnostic MPC.
2026: Invited survey A Unified View of MPC with Dynamic Committees in the Journal of the Indian Institute of Science.
2026: SNSF project grant Multi-Party Computation with Dynamic Committees (2026-2030, with Bernardo David) starts.
2025: SoK: Approximate Agreement (with Diana Ghinea) accepted at FC 2026.
Oct 2025: Velox accepted at CCS 2025.
Aug 2025: Two papers at CRYPTO 2025: computationally efficient asynchronous MPC, and leader election with polylogarithmic communication.
Jul 2025: Invited talk at the Simons Institute Workshop on Secure Computation, UC Berkeley.