TU Wien Informatics Awards 2024
The TU Wien Informatics Awards recognizes the most outstanding students from the faculty across all academic levels - Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctoral - and various research areas. This accolade highlights exceptional achievements and academic excellence within the TU Wien community, spotlighting the diverse and innovative work being conducted by its students. As an annual acknowledgment of the high standards of scholarship and research at the university, the awards serve as a platform to showcase the cutting-edge projects and theses that are shaping the future of informatics.
This year, the Best Dissertation Award at TU Wien Informatics was presented to Lukas Aumayr for his thesis titled “Foundations of Bitcoin-Compatible Scalability Protocols,” supervised by Matteo Maffei, Professor and Head of the Research Unit Security and Privacy. Andreas Steininger, Director of the Doctoral School, emphasized the rigorous selection process and the significant contributions to the scientific community made by all nominated theses. Six students were nominated for the Best Dissertation Award; however, Lukas Aumayr’s dissertation particularly stood out.
Lukas Aumayr’s work addresses scalability issues in permissionless blockchains, which enable decentralized money transfers among mutually untrusted users. The thesis evaluates existing Payment Channel Networks (PCN) protocols across security, privacy, efficiency, and functionality, highlighting their limitations. It introduces novel Bitcoin-compatible protocols such as Sleepy Channels for offline security, Blitz for faster multi-channel payments, and Thora for secure non-linear updates, among others. These novel protocols leverage Bitcoin’s scripting limitations to ensure broad compatibility with various cryptocurrencies, thereby enhancing scalability and broadening blockchain applications.
