Thursday, Feburary 25
9:00 – 12:00
Zoom link in registration email
The increase in large-scale distributed systems used by almost every service on the internet requires more sophisticated management of traffic, resources, and adversaries. It plays an increasingly more important role as the internet, and large-scale services, are accessible in more areas of the world every day.
Decentralized systems, on the other hand, is a relatively new field which has invigorated the security field with the introduction of digital, programmable money. Such systems have forced security professionals to consider a whole new class of adversaries and how to design systems around them.
However, as decentralized systems begin scaling to large populations the two areas start to overlap. The principles and research happening the networking world have become over more important to scaling cryptocurrencies.
In this session we explore networking and decentralized systems research, both where they differ and where they overlap. We will hear from students on the cutting edge of these areas of research.
The session consists of a keynote presentation by Ari Juels, Professor at Cornell University and Chief Scientists at Chain Link, followed by an invited student talk by Philip Daian, PhD student at Cornell University, and capped off by several student talks presenting recent and ongoing research.
Keynote Speaker – Prof. Ari Juels, Cornell Tech
Title: CanDID: Can-Do Decentralized Identity
Time: 9:00 – 9:35, Feburary 25
Abstract: Decentralized identity (DID) is the idea of empowering end users with the management of their own credentials. While DID promises to give users greater control over their private data, however, proposed DID systems have several notable drawbacks. They burden users with the management of private keys, creating a significant risk of key loss. They presume the availability of a credential-issuance ecosystem, creating a bootstrapping problem. Finally, they lack resistance to Sybil attacks.In this talk, I’ll introduce CanDID, a platform for the practical, user-friendly realization of decentralized identity.CanDID avoids the bootstrapping problem by issuing credentials in a user-friendly way that draws securely and privately on data from existing, unmodified web service providers. This legacy compatibility also enables CanDID users to leverage their existingonline accounts to address the challenge of key management. Finally, while providing strong confidentiality, CanDID prevents users from spawning multiple identities.
Biography: Ari Juels is the Weill Family Foundation and Joan and Sanford I. Weill Professor in the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and a Computer Science faculty member at Cornell University. He is a Co-Director of the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts (IC3). He is also Chief Scientist at Chainlink.
He was the Chief Scientist of RSA, Director of RSA Laboratories, and a Distinguished Engineer at EMC (now Dell EMC), where he worked until 2013. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from U.C. Berkeley in 1996.
His recent areas of interest include blockchains, cryptocurrency, and smart contracts, as well as applied cryptography, cloud security, user authentication, and privacy.
Student Keynote Speaker – Philip Daian, Cornell University
Title: DeFi: Composability or Compostability?
Time: 9:35 – 10:05, Feburary 25
Abstract: Decentralized finance or DeFi is a rapidly growing application of blockchains that realizes financial instruments as smart contracts. A major appeal of DeFi is composability: DeFi contracts can interoperate in more complex and efficient ways than traditional, legally based financial products. Despite billions of dollars of investment and exploits in the wild, though, there exist no rigorous frame-works or tools to analyze the economic security of DeFi contracts, particularly when they are composed. In this work, we present a new formal approach to reasoning about the economic security properties of standalone and composed DeFi contracts.
We develop our formalism based on miner extractable value (“MEV”), a metric previously devised to study consensus security by modeling the profit a miner can make through manipulating transaction execution ordering. We generalize MEV to analyze composed contracts, and use it as a metric to define secure composability for DeFi. We instantiate ourmodel in an executable formal modeling system. We then use this model to guide lessons fundamental to securing new DeFi protocols and measuring the security of protocols already developed in the wild, and use our tools to empirically quantify the security of several popular protocols we model. We hope our approach will form the basis of a new class of financial instruments with rigorous, computationally verifiable guarantees.
Student Speakers
Suryanarayana Sankagiri, UofI
The Longest-Chain Protocol under Random Delays
10:05 – 10:25, Feburary 25
Chiao Hsieh, UofI
Koord: A Language for Programming and Verifying Distributed Robotics Application
10:25 – 10:45, Feburary 25
Peiyao Sheng, UofI
ACeD: Scalable Data Availability Oracle
10:45 – 11:05, Feburary 25
Baike She, Purdue University
On a Network SIS Epidemic Model with Cooperative and Antagonistic Opinion Dynamics
11:05 – 11:25, Feburary 25