Date: Wednesday November 29, 2023
Time: 3:00pm MST
Room: Zoom zoom.us, Meeting ID 993 9082 4920, passcode 837686
The talk will be on zoom; a viewing on projector will be in Cramer 124.
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Abstract: Blockchains enable cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and entire financial ecosystems that avoid centralized root of trusts. While decentralized applications (dApps) and smart contracts that are built over blockchains are finding widespread acceptance, there are several exciting research challenges to be addressed. The first challenge is the transaction throughput of blockchains remains abysmal compared to fiat currencies, e.g., 7 transactions/second for Bitcoin and 15 transaction/second for Ethereum. Furthermore, it seems increasingly clear that there are real-world situations where the immutability of transactions (append-only) guaranteed by blockchains can be misused by rogue actors. Finally, the transformative power of blockchains can and should be harnessed for applications beyond decentralized finance. |
This talk with focus on three of our recent works that address each of the three aforementioned challenges. The first work is about building secure and private Layer-2 protocols, specifically, credit (or payment) channel networks, that helps users transact in a completely off-chain way, thus increasing the transaction throughput by orders of magnitude. The second work is about using a blockchain to build a secure surveillance auditing system, that ensures the integrity of the process while providing public audibility. The third work is about building a system that helps remove or redact offensive or maliciously posted transactions from the blockchain, e.g., someone's personally identifiable information.