Hi! 💖

My name is Diana Ghinea and I am a Senior Research Associate at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, where I work in the Information Systems Lab and Blockchain Lab. My research focuses on Byzantine Fault Tolerance in Distributed Computing.

Previously, I completed my Ph.D. in the DISCO group at ETH Zurich, where I was advised by Prof. Roger Wattenhofer. I hold a master’s degree in Computer Science from ETH Zurich, and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from University of Bucharest. During my studies, I was fortunate to mix theory with practice by interning with various teams in Google.

Papers

You can find my Google Scholar page here.

Manuscripts

• Validity in Responsive Byzantine Agreement
  Diana Ghinea, Simon Holmgaard Kamp and Chen-Da Liu-Zhang
  [Eprint]
• General Convex Agreement with Near-Optimal Communication
  Marc Dufay, Diana Ghinea and Anton Paramonov
  [Arxiv]

Published papers

• Network-Agnostic Multidimensional Approximate Agreement with Optimal Resilience
  Diana Ghinea, Darya Melnyk and Tijana Milentijević
  45th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC)
  Egham, England, Jul ‘26
  [Eprint]
• Round and Resilience-Optimal Approximate Agreement on Trees and Block Graphs
  Marc Fuchs, Diana Ghinea, Zahra Parsaeian and Joel Rybicki
  [an earlier version has appeared as a Brief Announcement at PODC’25]
  45th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC)
  Egham, England, Jul ‘26
  [Arxiv]
• Round-Optimal Byzantine Agreement without Trusted Setup
  Diana Ghinea, Ivana Klasovitá and Chen-Da Liu-Zhang
  Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptology and Information Security (EUROCRYPT)
  Rome, Italy, May ’26
  [Eprint]
• SoK: Approximate Agreement
  Diana Ghinea and Chen-Da Liu-Zhang
  International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC)
  St. Kitts, Mar ’26
  [Eprint]
• Validity in Network-Agnostic Byzantine Agreement
  ✨Highlighted paper✨
  Andrei Constantinescu, Marc Dufay, Diana Ghinea and Roger Wattenhofer
  39th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC)
  Berlin, Germany, Oct ’25
  [Arxiv]
• Brief Announcement: Towards Round-Optimal Approximate Agreement on Trees
  Marc Fuchs, Diana Ghinea and Zahra Parsaeian
  44th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC)
  Huatulco, Mexico, Jun ‘25
  [Arxiv]
• Byzantine Stable Matching
  ✨Best paper award✨
  Andrei Constantinescu, Marc Dufay, Diana Ghinea and Roger Wattenhofer
  44th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC)
  Huatulco, Mexico, Jun ‘25
  [Arxiv]
• Communication-Optimal Convex Agreement
  [an earlier version has appeared as a Brief Announcement at PODC’24]
  Diana Ghinea, Chen-Da Liu-Zhang and Roger Wattenhofer
  44th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC)
  Huatulco, Mexico, Jun ‘25
  [Eprint]
• Brief Announcement: Unifying Partial Synchrony
  Andrei Constantinescu, Diana Ghinea, Jakub Sliwinski and Roger Wattenhofer
  38th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC)
  Madrid, Spain, Oct ‘24
  [Arxiv]
• Convex Consensus with Asynchronous Fallback
  Andrei Constantinescu, Diana Ghinea, Roger Wattenhofer and Floris Westermann
  38th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC)
  Madrid, Spain, Oct ‘24
  [Eprint]
• Brief Announcement: Communication-Optimal Convex Agreement
  Diana Ghinea, Chen-Da Liu-Zhang and Roger Wattenhofer
  43rd ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC)
  Nantes, France, Jun ‘24
  [Eprint]
• A Fair and Resilient Decentralized Clock Network for Transaction Ordering
  Andrei Constantinescu, Diana Ghinea, Lioba Heimbach, Zilin Wang and Roger Wattenhofer
  27th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS)
  Tokyo, Japan, Dec ‘23
  [Arxiv]
• Hybrid Post-Quantum Signatures in Hardware Security Keys
  ✨Best workshop paper award✨
  Diana Ghinea, Fabian Kaczmarczyck, Jennifer Pullman, Julien Cretin, Rafael Misoczki, Stefan Kölbl, Luca Invernizzi, Elie Bursztein and Jean-Michel Picod
  4th ACNS Workshop on Secure Cryptographic Implementation
  Kyoto, Japan, Jun ‘23
  [Eprint]
• Multidimensional Approximate Agreement with Asynchronous Fallback
  Diana Ghinea, Chen-Da Liu-Zhang and Roger Wattenhofer
  35th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA)
  Orlando, Florida, Jun ‘23
  [Eprint][Talk]
• Optimal Synchronous Approximate Agreement with Asynchronous Fallback
  Diana Ghinea, Chen-Da Liu-Zhang and Roger Wattenhofer
  41st ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC)
  Salerno, Italy, Jul ‘22
  [Eprint][Talk]
• Round-Optimal Byzantine Agreement
  Diana Ghinea, Vipul Goyal and Chen-Da Liu-Zhang
  Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptology and Information Security (EUROCRYPT)
  Trondheim, Norway, May ‘22
  [Eprint]
• From Partial to Global Asynchronous Reliable Broadcast
  Diana Ghinea, Martin Hirt and Chen-Da Liu-Zhang
  34th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC)
  Online, Oct ‘20
  [Eprint][Talk]

Thesis

My doctoral thesis can be found here.

🏅Awarded the ETH Zurich Silver Medal, which recognizes outstanding doctoral theses.

🏅Co-winner of the 2026 Principles of Distributed Computing Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Resume

On Ideas

The mind is not capable of creating anything fundamentally new. It simply constructs a new version of a house from old building blocks. The material for any scientific discovery […] is received by the mind through the heart.

— Vadim Zeland

Contact

[first name].[last name]@hslu.ch