People use the term blockchain technology to mean different things, and it can be confusing. Sometimes they are talking about the Bitcoin Blockchain, sometimes it is other virtual currencies, sometimes it is smart contracts. Most of the time though, they are talking about distributed ledgers, i.e., a list of transactions that is shared among a number of computers, rather than being stored on a central server

The attendees are advised to learn about Blockchain using the following references:

• Antony Lewis: A Gentle Introduction to Blockchain Technology
• Stanford Course on Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies
• Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies Princeton

  Content

• Prerequisites
• Requirements
• Schedule
• List of Potential Papers

Prerequisites

    Computational Models and Logic or Cryptography

Seminar Requirements

• Read TBD the article by TBD
• Select a topic by TBD
• Read the article before presenting your paper
• Participate in seminar talks (can miss one)
• Meet the instructor twice

Schedule

1. Sunday 3/3: Mooly Sagiv An overview of the Blockchain technology
   An advise on presentations
2. Sunday 10/3, Ittay Eyal: Teechain: Scalable Blockchain Payments using Trusted Execution Environments
3. Sunday 17/3, Mooly Sagiv: Contract Verification
4. Sunday 8/4, Idan Gerichter: Proof of Work
5. Sunday 15/4, Dor Cohen: Merkel Trees
6. Sunday 22/4,Yonatan Sompolinsky: BlockDAG protocols
7. Sunday 29/4, Nitzan Ben-Hur: Paxos Made Simple
   Tal Kopelevich: Practical Bynzantine Tolerance
8. Sunday May 6: Roy Saar: SOK
   Tomer Salomon: Hashcash-a denial of service counter-measure.
9. Sunday May 13, Ittai Abraham: Nakamoto Consensus
10. Sunday May 19, Shavuot
11. Sunday May 27,Guy Shacht, Cryptocurrencies without proof of work
    Ophir Pickman: Crypto & Security - Solidus: Confidential Distributed Ledger Transactions via PVORM
12. Sunday June 3, Gal zeevi: Majority is not enough: Bitcoin mining is vulnerable.
13. Sunday June 10,Yotam Shkedi, Paralysis Proofs: Safe Access-Structure Updates for Cryptocurrencies and More

List of Papers

All the articles can be located in the internet using a search engine. Please use most updated version. Please also download and play with any other available material. Please do not use author's slides.

Cryptography & Security

1. A certified digital signature. R. C. Merkle. In G. Brassard, editor, Proc. CRYPTO ’89, volume 435 of LNCS, pages 218–238. Springer-Verlag, 1989.
2. Scalable Zero Knowledge Via Cycles of Elliptic Curves. Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Eran Tromer, Madars Virza: Algorithmica 79(4): 1102-1160 (2017)
3. Hashcash-a denial of service counter-measure. Back, Adam. 2002.
4. OmniLedger: A Secure, Scale-Out, Decentralized Ledger via Sharding  Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Philipp Jovanovic, Linus Gasser, Nicolas Gailly, Bryan Ford. IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive 2017: 406 (2017)
5. Bolt: Anonymous Payment Channels for Decentralized Currencies. Matthew Green and Ian Miers. 2017. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 473-489.
6. Cynthia Dwork, Moni Naor: Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail. CRYPTO 1992: 139-147
7. Solidus: Confidential Distributed Ledger Transactions via PVORM. Ethan Cecchetti, Fan Zhang, Yan Ji, Ahmed E. Kosba, Ari Juels, Elaine Shi. CCS 2017
8. Zero-Knowledge Contingent Payments Revisited: Attacks and Payments for Services. Matteo Campanelli, Rosario Gennaro, Steven Goldfeder, Luca Nizzardo. CCS 2017: 229-243
9. Stefanie Roos, Pedro Moreno-Sanchez, Aniket Kate, Ian Goldberg. Settling payments fast and private: efficient decentralized routing for path-based transactions, NDSS'18 Click here

Consensus

1. Paxos made simple. Lamport, Leslie. ACM Sigact News 32.4 (2001): 18-25. https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf
2. Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance. Castro, Miguel, and Barbara Liskov. "Practical Byzantine fault tolerance." OSDI. Vol. 99. 1999.
3. SoK: Consensus in the Age of Blockchains. Bano et al., arXiv 2017
4. Majority is not enough: Bitcoin mining is vulnerable. Eyal, Ittay, and Emin Gün Sirer. International conference on financial cryptography and data security. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2014.
5. Demystifying Incentives in the Consensus Computer. Luu, Loi, et al. Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. ACM, 2015.
6. Cryptocurrencies without proof of work. Bentov, Iddo, Ariel Gabizon, and Alex Mizrahi. International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2016.
7. The honey badger of BFT protocols. Miller, Andrew, et al. Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. ACM, 2016.
8. Conrad Burchert, Christian Decker, Roger Wattenhofer:Scalable Funding of Bitcoin Micropayment Channel Networks - Regular Submission. SSS 2017: 361-377
9. Kogias, E. K., Jovanovic, P., Gailly, N., Khoffi, I., Gasser, L., & Ford, B. (2016, August). Enhancing bitcoin security and performance with strong consistency via collective signing. In 25th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 16) (pp. 279-296).
10. Ittay Eyal, Adem Efe Gencer, Emin Gün Sirer, Robbert van Renesse: Bitcoin-NG: A Scalable Blockchain Protocol. NSDI 2016: 45-59

 

Smart Contracts

1. ZEUS: Analyzing Safety of Smart Contracts. Sukrit Kalra (IBM Research), Seep Goel (IBM Research), Mohan Dhawan (IBM Research), and Subodh Sharma (IIT Delhi).
2. A next-generation smart contract and decentralized application platform. white paper. Vitalik Buterin. 2014.
3. Online Detection of Effectively Callback Free Objects with Applications to Smart Contracts. Shelly Grossman, Ittai Abraham, Guy Golan-Gueta, Yan Michalevsky, Noam Rinetzky, Mooly Sagiv, Yoni Zohar
4. Smart Contracts for Bribing Miners. Patrick McCorry, Alexander Hicks and Sarah Meiklejohn. WTSC 2018.
5. A smart contract for boardroom voting with maximum voter privacy. McCorry, Patrick, Siamak F. Shahandashti, and Feng Hao. International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Springer, Cham, 2017.
6. Designing Secure Ethereum Smart Contracts: A Finite State Machine Based Approach. Anastasia Mavridou, Aron Laszka. Financial Cryptography. 2018.
7. BitML: a calculus for Bitcoin smart contracts. Bartoletti, Massimo, and Roberto Zunino. IACR.
8. Lightweight Logging over the Blockchain for Data-Intensive Applications. Yuzhe Tang, Zihao Xing, Cheng Xu, Ju Chen and Jianliang Xu. WTSC 2018.
9. Setting standards for altering and undoing smart contracts. Marino, Bill, and Ari Juels. International Symposium on Rules and Rule Markup Languages for the Semantic Web. Springer, Cham, 2016.
10. Towards Verifying Ethereum Smart Contract Bytecode in Isabelle/HOL. CPP 2018.
11. Smartcast: An incentive compatible consensus protocol using smart contracts. Kothapalli, Abhiram, Andrew Miller, and Nikita Borisov. International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Springer, Cham, 2017.

Miscellaneous

1. Sok: Research perspectives and challenges for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Bonneau, Joseph, et al. Security and Privacy (SP), 2015 IEEE Symposium on. IEEE, 2015.
2. Paralysis Proofs: Safe Access-Structure Updates for Cryptocurrencies and More. Fan Zhang, Philip Daian, Iddo Bentov, Ari Juels, Phil Daian. BITCOIN’18
3. Scalability of Trustless Trust. Dominik Harz and Magnus Boman. WTSC’18
4. A blockchain-based approach for data accountability and provenance tracking. Neisse, Ricardo, Gary Steri, and Igor Nai-Fovino. ARES 2017: 14:1-14:10

For further information Email:msagiv@post.tau.ac.il