Security & Privacy for Blockchains and Distributed Ledger Technologies

Posted by Mihaela Rozman on Tuesday, October 1, 2019 · Leave a Comment

BDLT19 as the first one in a series of International Summer Schools

The 1st International Summer School on Security & Privacy for Blockchains and Distributed Ledger Technologies (BDLT 2019) was jointly organized by the members of the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) and Princeton University. In its first edition, was hosted by the Security and Privacy Group at TU Wien in Vienna, Austria from September 2, 2019 to September 6, 2019.

Presenting high-profile lecturers coming from academia and industry, the first edition of the summer school provided the 85 student, academic, and industry attendees with an opportunity to learn about cutting-edge topics on blockchains and other distributed ledger technologies. The summer school offered lectures, hands-on tutorials, and workshops, with a focus on published and current high-impact research projects. The school covered cutting-edge topics on blockchains and other distributed ledger technologies to foster understanding of their respective security and privacy specific requirements and guarantees by bringing together academic researchers and experts from industry. Example topics include, but are not limited to: novel attacks on distributed systems; consensus protocols and fault tolerance; incentive structures, such as proof-of-work and proof-of-stake; recent results on blockchain scalability, payment channels and state channels; advancements on smart contracts; or, realistic adversarial capabilities.

Thanks to the generous support of sponsors such as Liquidity Network, Nimiq, Research Institute, Bitpanda, NuCypher, Bolt Labs, the Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms, and the City of Vienna, participants were able to network with experts from academia and industry, sponsors, and among each other.

Hype or Digital-Social Revolution? Academic and Industry Perspectives

Moderated by Matteo Maffei from TU Wien Informatics, the summer school’s closing panel with Patrick McCorry from King’s College and PISA Research, Jing Chen from Stony Brook University and Algorand, and Krzysztof Pietrzak from IST Austria opened the opportunity of discussing the future of blockchain technologies. It highlighted the technologies’ disruptive potential, from giving control over citizens’ money back to them, to reducing the processing costs of financial transactions, to enabling a worldwide trustworthy distributed computing platform. It also discussed the grand challenges of blockchain technologies, in particular emphasizing the need of interdisciplinary research for bridging cryptography and economy, and the need to address scalability and sustainability.

Download the speaker’s presentation slides at DBLT School’s website.