COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH WEEK 2019

Blockmania & Chainspace: from byzantine consensus to scalable cross shard distributed ledgers

Speaker
Dr George Danezis, Professor, University College London
Contact Person
Dr Reza SHOKRI, Associate Professor, School of Computing
reza@comp.nus.edu.sg

07 Jan 2019 Monday, 04:30 PM to 06:00 PM

SR1, COM1-02-06

This is a distinguished talk as part of the NUS Computer Science Research Week 2019 (http://researchweek.comp.nus.edu.sg).

Abstract:

Smart contract platforms have received considerable interest, after the rise of Etherium. However, currently deployed systems suffer from inherent scalability drawbacks, that new designs are trying to overcome. I will present Chainspace, a scalable distributed ledger and smart contract platform that scales arbitrarily according the number of nodes committed into the system. The novel cross shard atomic commit protocol it uses is an independent building block that can inspire other systems, but its practical implementation requires tweaks to ensure security, which I will also discuss. I will also talk about Blockmania, a modernized variant of Practical Byzatine Fault Tolerant consensus, that in our lab experiments outperforms naive implementations, as well as how it is integrated into Chainspace or other Blockchain or traditional consensus systems.

The talk starts with a background on byzantine consensus (ala PBFT) and present Blockmania; then talk about sharding and Chainspace. The first part will contain a certain amount of tutorial material.


Biodata:

George Danezis is a Professor of Security and Privacy Engineering at the Department of Computer Science of University College London, and Head of the Information Security Research Group. He has been working on anonymous communications, privacy enhancing technologies (PET), and traffic analysis since 2000. He has previously been a researcher for Microsoft Research, Cambridge; a visiting fellow at K.U.Leuven (Belgium); and a research associate at the University of Cambridge (UK), where he also completed his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Prof. R.J. Anderson.

His theoretical contributions to the Privacy Technologies field include the established information theoretic and other probabilistic metrics for anonymity and pioneering the study of statistical attacks against anonymity systems. On the practical side he is one of the lead designers of the anonymous mail system Mixminion, as well as Minx, Sphinx, Drac and Hornet; he has worked on the traffic analysis of deployed protocols such as Tor.

His current research interests focus around secure communications, high-integrity systems to support privacy, smart grid privacy, peer-to-peer and social network security, as well as the application of machine learning techniques to security problems. He has published over 70 peer-reviewed scientific papers on these topics in international conferences and journals.

He was the co-program chair of ACM Computer and Communications Security Conference in 2011 and 2012, IFCA Financial Cryptography and Data Security in 2011, the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Workshop in 2005 and 2006. He sits on the PET Symposium board and ACM CCS Steering committee and he regularly serves in program committees of leading conferences in the field of privacy and security. He is a fellow of the British Computing Society since 2014.