Ling Ren

Ling Ren is an Assistant Professor at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2018 and held a postdoctoral position at VMware Research Group before joining UIUC. His research bridges theoretical and practical aspects of applied cryptography and secure distributed algorithms.

• University: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• School: Siebel School of Computing and Data Science
• Department: Department of Computer Science
• Academic Rank: Assistant Professor

Research Interests: Ling Ren focuses on designing algorithms that combine practical efficiency with provable security. His work spans threshold/distributed cryptography, fault-tolerant consensus (blockchain), and privacy-preserving protocols like Private Information Retrieval (PIR). Recent projects include Granular Synchrony for unified network timing models and Practical Asynchronous Distributed Key Generation for blockchain infrastructure.

Selected Publications (2025-2023): Recent works cover verifiable secret sharing, BLS threshold signatures, batch PIR protocols, and asynchronous consensus algorithms. These publications address foundational challenges in cryptographic security and distributed systems, with applications to blockchain scalability and privacy.

• 2025: Verifiable Secret Sharing Simplified, Single-Server Client Preprocessing PIR
• 2024: S3PIR Protocol, Adaptively Secure BLS Threshold Signatures
• 2023: Threshold Signatures from Inner Product Argument

Scientific Awards:

• NSF CAREER (2022)
• Google Research Scholar Award (2023)
• Chaincode Lab Bitcoin Research Prize (2023)
• Best Paper Runner-up at CCS (2021)
• Top Picks in Hardware and Embedded Security (2018)

Teaching & Advising: Ling Ren teaches graduate courses such as CS 539 (Distributed Algorithms) and CS 461 (Computer Security I). He advises current students like Sourav Das and Ananya Appan, while past advisees include Zhuolun Xiang (PhD 2022) and Muhammad Haris Mughees (PhD 2024).