Towards Digital Trust at Scale
Event details
| Date | 19.02.2019 |
| Hour | 10:00 › 12:00 |
| Speaker | Philipp Jovanovic |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Abstract
The history of the Internet serves both as an inspiration on how much value can be created when building systems on top of open, neutral, and fair protocols but also as a warning that placing too much trust and power in a small number of for-profit organizations might turn into an existential threat to the democratic foundations of our society.
Permissionless distributed ledgers, or blockchains, have the potential to reduce dependencies on trusted intermediaries and enable the creation of systems which facilitate and simplify collaboration between mutually distrustful parties on a global scale. However, the widespread adoption of such distributed ledger technologies has been inhibited in particular by scalability issues in terms of the total transaction processing volume, transaction confirmation latency, and the number of independent participants involved in transaction processing.
In this talk, I will describe how to overcome these challenges by introducing a line of research that led up to the decentralized ledger framework called OmniLedger. OmniLedger achieves scale-out throughput due to an integrated secure decentralized sharding mechanism, keeps the transaction confirmation latency low, and utilizes a mechanism for secure atomic cross-shard transactions. I will, furthermore, introduce the core technologies that enabled the development of OmniLedger which include ByzCoin, a scalable Byzantine fault tolerant consensus mechanism, and RandHound, a scalable protocol for generation of distributed publicly verifiable unbiasable randomness that is fundamentally needed for secure decentralized sharding. Finally, I will also present evaluation results for those protocols showing, for example, that OmniLedger is capable of competing with the performance of legacy payment networks like Visa in terms of throughput and transaction confirmation latency.
Short bio
Philipp Jovanovic is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. Before joining EPFL, he received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Passau, Germany, in 2015.
His research interests broadly include applied cryptography, information security, and decentralized systems and his recent work involves improving scalability, security, and privacy aspects of blockchains and cryptocurrencies.
However, he has also worked on a wide variety of other security-related topics, including design and analysis of symmetric cryptographic primitives, side-channel attacks and countermeasures, hardware Trojans, or security analysis of protocols deployed in the real world such as TLS or the Open Smart Grid Protocol.
The history of the Internet serves both as an inspiration on how much value can be created when building systems on top of open, neutral, and fair protocols but also as a warning that placing too much trust and power in a small number of for-profit organizations might turn into an existential threat to the democratic foundations of our society.
Permissionless distributed ledgers, or blockchains, have the potential to reduce dependencies on trusted intermediaries and enable the creation of systems which facilitate and simplify collaboration between mutually distrustful parties on a global scale. However, the widespread adoption of such distributed ledger technologies has been inhibited in particular by scalability issues in terms of the total transaction processing volume, transaction confirmation latency, and the number of independent participants involved in transaction processing.
In this talk, I will describe how to overcome these challenges by introducing a line of research that led up to the decentralized ledger framework called OmniLedger. OmniLedger achieves scale-out throughput due to an integrated secure decentralized sharding mechanism, keeps the transaction confirmation latency low, and utilizes a mechanism for secure atomic cross-shard transactions. I will, furthermore, introduce the core technologies that enabled the development of OmniLedger which include ByzCoin, a scalable Byzantine fault tolerant consensus mechanism, and RandHound, a scalable protocol for generation of distributed publicly verifiable unbiasable randomness that is fundamentally needed for secure decentralized sharding. Finally, I will also present evaluation results for those protocols showing, for example, that OmniLedger is capable of competing with the performance of legacy payment networks like Visa in terms of throughput and transaction confirmation latency.
Short bio
Philipp Jovanovic is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. Before joining EPFL, he received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Passau, Germany, in 2015.
His research interests broadly include applied cryptography, information security, and decentralized systems and his recent work involves improving scalability, security, and privacy aspects of blockchains and cryptocurrencies.
However, he has also worked on a wide variety of other security-related topics, including design and analysis of symmetric cryptographic primitives, side-channel attacks and countermeasures, hardware Trojans, or security analysis of protocols deployed in the real world such as TLS or the Open Smart Grid Protocol.
Practical information
- General public
- Free