Praveen's personal website

Praveensankar Manimaran

Praveensankar Manimaran is currently doing PhD at the Department of Computer Science, University of Oslo, Norway. His research interests are Blockchain Protocols, Decentralized Applications, Distributed Systems, and Applied Cryptography. Praveen's PhD gave him experience in identifying and solving non-trivial research problems that directly impact the industry use cases. In addition, Praveen has experience in project management, effective communication and coordination of tasks among team members, and time management.

github linkedin google scholar ORCID Resume

email : praveema@ifi.uio.no

Education Details

PhD - Verifiable Credentials and Blockchain

University of Oslo, Norway. (October 2020 - Present)

Research in Verifiable Credentials and Blockchain Technologies
Worked on privacy issues in VCs's revocation and verification, and developed solutions using techniques such as Merkle Tree Accumulators, BBS Signatures, and Zero-Knowledge Proofs.
Implemented prototypes to showcase the practicality of the solutions.
Published research papers in top venues.
Installed and maintained Norway's EBSI pilot node
Supervisors: Roman Vitenberg (Homepage), Leander Jehl (Homepage)
Advisors: Thiago Garrett (Homepage), Mayank Raikwar (Homepage), Arlindo F. Conceição (Homepage)

M.Tech. - Computer Science and Engineering

National Institute of Technology Puducherry, karaikal, India. (July 2018 - June 2020)

CGPA - 9.82 / 10 (gold medal)

B.E. - Computer Science and Engineering

PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, India. (July 2012 - May 2016)

CGPA - 7.69 / 10

Publications

Prevoke: Privacy-Preserving Configurable Method for Revoking Verifiable Credentials

2024 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain)

Prevoke keeps track of the revocation status of VCs using a Bloom Filter, and a Merkle Tree Accumulator (MTAcc). These data structures are stored in a DLT using a Smart Contract and updated during revocation of VCs
Prevoke proposes a novel two-phase verification technique which enables efficient and fast verification of almost all valid VCs. Only revoked VCs and handful of valid VCs go through expensive verification

Link: To appear soon

Understanding Decentralized Identity: From Federated to Self-Sovereign Identity Management Systems

ACM Computing Surveys (Under Review)

Provides a generic model to analyse the architecture of IMSs
Using the generic model, analyze a) IOTA Id, b) Indy, and c) eIDAS.
Discusses the differences between these IMSs using a novel taxonomy

Link: To appear soon

Addressing traceability of revocation status of Verifiable Credentials

Work in Progress

Utilises Zero-Knowlege Proofs to address traceability problem

Link: To appear soon

Projects

Prevoke- Implementation

University of Oslo, Norway. (August 2023 - August 2024)

This Implementation demonstrates the working of Prevoke in a sand-boxed environment.
This implementation consists of a) standard entities (Issuer, Holder, and Verifier), b) a Smart Contract, and c) a mock VC data model based on W3C Specifications.
Workflows: 1) issuance, 2) revocation, 3) VP construction and sharing, and 4) VP verification
In addition, Smart Contract is deployed on a Private Blockchain using Ganache, hosted in NREC.
The entities are hosted as servers and geographically distributed using NREC.
Results: We analyzed the performance, latency, and cost of Prevoke for different workloads.
Languages: Golang, Solidity, and Python

github link

Work Experience

Summer Research Intern

National Institute of Technology Calicut, Kozhikode, India. (May 2019 - July 2019)

Studied about Software Defined Networking, mininet simulator, Named Data Networking and usage of NDN in VANET
Designed and developed Intrusion Detection System for NDN Based VANET

Software Engineer

Accolite Software India Pvt. Ltd., Bangalore, India. (July 2016 - March 2017)

Worked on the web development
Language - C#, Javascript, Web framework - ASP.NET MVC, backend technology - ASP.NET, frontend technology - Jquery and AngularJS, database - Microsoft SQL Server
Worked on web development for British Telecommunications through Accolite

Software Engineer Intern

Accolite Software India Pvt. Ltd., Bangalore, India. (January 2016 - April 2016)

Worked on the web development
Language - C#, Javascript, Web framework - ASP.NET MVC, backend technology - ASP.NET, frontend technology - Jquery and AngularJS, database - Microsoft SQL Server
Learned about web development in general and studied ASP.NET and Basic javascript for developing websites
Studied about 3 Layer architecture in ASP.NET

Other Activities

Skills

Programming Languages:  Golang, Solidity,
Expertise: Verifiable Credentials, Blockchain, Self-Sovereign Identity, Web3

Achievements

Scored 96.03 Percentile in Computer Science, GATE 2018
Scored 98.02% in HSC exam, 2012
Scored Centum in Computer Science, HSC exam, 2012
Scored 97.80% in SSLC exam, 2010
Scored Centum in Maths and Science, SSLC exam, 2010

Teaching work

Teaching Assistant - IN5420/IN9420: Distributed Blockchain Technologies

University of Oslo, Norway. (Spring 2022, Spring 2023)

Teaching Assistant - IN5020/IN9020: Distributed Systems

University of Oslo, Norway. (Autumn 2022, Aumtum 2023)