Dr. Mira Belenkiy

Mira Belenkiy is a professional cryptographer with 14+ years of industry experience.  She has worked with numerous product teams on the design, development, and final review of their product at all stages of the development lifecycle.  Her expertise is in authentication, blockchain, smart contracts, and key management. 

Mira earned a Ph.D. in cryptography at Brown University in 2008, and a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics at Brandeis University in 2003. She began her career at Microsoft Research and has also worked at Circle.

Selected Past Projects

Stable Coin Ethereum Smart Contract

The Circle USDC stable-coin is an ERC-20 worth $44 billion and $4 billion daily trading volume. Mira Belenkiy designed and developed three smart contracts that manage the supply of USDC. Also worked on the cold storage system that secures the USDC private keys.

Blockchain Seminar

Learn the technology behind the hype.  My seminar takes you under the hood of the biggest crypto-currencies.  I'll take you past the buzz-words and into the hard problems that each crypto-currency tries to solve.  After this course, you'll know the strengths and weaknesses of major crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Monero, and Stellar, and be able to evaluate the technical claims of their competitors.  Custom content available based on your companies' individual interests.

U-Prove

U-Prove is an open source anonymous credentials library released by Microsoft Research. Mira Belenkiy designed and developed the PolyProof library for the U-Prove Extensions C# SDK (link does not work on mobile devices). PolyProof creates complex zero-knowledge proofs committed secrets and about attributes in anonymouse credentials. Users can anonymously prove their age falls in a certain range, their job title is part of a certain set, or two separate credentials belong to the same person.

Distributed Key Management

DKM, an internal Microsoft distributed key management  library is now deployed across many Microsoft products such as Outlook Live and System Center VMM. During her time at Microsoft Research, Mira worked with over 50 product teams to develop a common solution to key management for distributed systems.  

Publications

My maiden name is Mira Meyerovich.  Note: cryptography proceedings always list authors in alphabetical order.

  1. Tolga Acar, Mira Belenkiy, Alptekin Kupcu. Single Password Authentication, in Computer Networks 2013, Elsevier, June 2013.

  2. Tolga Acar, Mira Belenkiy, Mihir Bellare, and David Cash, Cryptographic Agility and its Relation to Circular Encryption, in EUROCRYPT 2010, Springer Verlag, May 2010

  3. Mira Belenkiy, Jan Camenisch, Melissa Chase, Markulf Kohlweiss, Anna Lysyanskaya, and Hovav Shacham, Randomizable Proofs and Delegatable Anonymous Credentials, in CRYPTO 2009, Springer Verlag, August 2009

  4. Mira Belenkiy, Melissa Chase, Markulf Kohlweiss, and Anna Lysyanskaya, Compact E-Cash and Simulatable VRFs, in Pairing 2009, Springer Verlag, August 2009

  5. Mira Belenkiy, Melissa Chase, Markulf Kohlweiss, and Anna Lysyanskaya, P-signatures and Noninteractive Anonymous Credentials, in Theory of Cryptography Conference 2008, Springer Verlag, February 2008

  6. Mira Belenkiy, Melissa Chase, C. Christopher Erway, John Jannotti, Alptekin Kupcu, and Anna Lysyanskaya, Incentivizing Outsourced Computation, in NetEcon 2008, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 2008

  7. Jan Camenisch, Anna Lysyanskaya, and Mira Meyerovich, Endorsed E-Cash, in IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, IEEE Computer Society, June 2007

  8. Mira Belenkiy, Melissa Chase, C. Christopher Erway, John Jannotti, Alptekin Kupcu, Anna Lysyanskaya, and Eric Rachlin, Making P2P Accountable Without Losing Privacy, in Workshop on Privacy in Electronic Society, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 2007

  9. Jan Camenisch, Susan Hohenberger, Markulf Kohlweiss, Anna Lysyanskaya, and Mira Meyerovich, How to Win the Clonewars: Efficient Periodic n-Times Anonymous Authentication, in ACM CCS, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., October 2006

  10. Anna Lysyanskaya and Mira Meyerovich, Provably Secure Steganography with Imperfect Sampling, in Public Key Cryptography, Springer Verlag, 2006.

  11. Case Study: Windows XP. Lucas Ballard, Mira Meyerovich. Operating Systems, 3rd Edition. Deitel, Deitel and Choffnes. Prentice Hall, 2003. Chapter 21, pp 1033—1112.

Patents

  1. Christian T. Wentz, Mira Belenkiy, Anna Lysyanskaya, Ilia Lebedev. Methods and Systems for Implementing Mixed Protocol Certificates. Filed 2020.

  2. Tolga Acar, Mira Belenkiy, Henry Jerez, Alptekin Kupcu. Securing Passwords Against Dictionary Attacks. Filed 2010.

  3. Tolga Acar, Mira Belenkiy, Carl Ellison. Distributed Key Management. Filed 2009.

  4. Tolga Acar, Mira Belenkiy, Josh Benaloh, Carl M Ellison, Niels Thomas Ferguson, Duy Lan Nguyen. Managing Group Keys. Filed 2009.