Blockchain and Cybersecurity Workshop

Prateek Saxena

Assistant Professor, National University of Singapore

Dawn Song

Professor, University of California, Berkeley

Founder and CEO, Oasis Labs

Abstract
Oasis Labs is building a privacy-first cloud computing platform on blockchain. With privacy built-in in every layer of the platform and a new blockchain architecture, Oasis is the first smart contract platform to provide security, privacy, and high scalability. Oasis technology’s unique properties and capabilities enable a broad spectrum of new applications from finance and healthcare to AI and gaming. In this talk, I will describe an overview of the technologies and sample applications.

Abhik Roychoudhury

Professor, National University of Singapore

Ilya Sergey

Associate Professor, Yale-NUS

The interest in formal methods and verification of correctness-critical systems has been on the rise in the past few years. But what are the gains from proving statements about software in full mathematical rigour, and how far can we extend our trust in formal methods, when talking about distributed systems and their applications?
In my talk, I will provide an overview of the state of the art in the formal verification of distributed protocols (and specifically blockchain-based systems), their implementations, and applications. I will discuss the implications of those results and outline some avenues for the future efforts in this exciting area.

Chen Haibo

Professor, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Hans Brown

Head of International Technology, Asia Pacific & Latin America, BNY Mellon

Lam Kwok Yan

Professor, Nanyang Technological University

Abstract
This talk begins with a discussion on the nature of Blockchain as a distributed system service. Based on this, we identify the kind of distributed applications that Blockchain is more suitable for. We then introduce the e-Supply Chain Ecosystem as a Blockchain application, and discuss the use of Blockchain for supporting synchronized distributed transaction execution through the notion of Smart Contract. The talk will also discuss the privacy and security issues of the Blockchain platform when supporting e-Supply Chain applications.

Mark v. Staalduinen

Deputy Director, TNO Singapore

Abstract
Blockchain technology has become almost as famous for incidents involving security breaches as for its innovative potential. We shed light on the prevalence and nature of these incidents. It started in 2011 with Bitcoin supported cases in the Dark Web. To unlock the real Blockchain potential, we need Blockchain Security by Design, also to make next steps for example towards Blockchain-driven IoT Security.

Mustafa Al-Bassam

PhD Student, University College London

Ming Wu

Chief Technology Officer of Conflux-Chain

Abstract
This talk presents Conflux, a fast, scalable and decentralized blockchain system that optimistically process concurrent blocks without discarding any as forks. The Conflux consensus protocol represents relationships between blocks as a direct acyclic graph and achieves consensus on a total order of the blocks. Conflux then, from the block order, deterministically derives a transaction total order as the blockchain ledger. We evaluated Conflux on Amazon EC2 clusters with up to 20k full nodes. Conflux achieves a transaction throughput of 5.76GB/h while confirming transactions in 4.5-7.4 minutes. The throughput is equivalent to 6400 transactions per second for typical Bitcoin transactions. Our results also indicate that when running Conflux, the consensus protocol is no longer the throughput bottleneck. The bottleneck is instead at the processing capability of individual nodes.

Keith Carter

Associate Professor, National University of Singapore

Eugene Aseev

Chief Technology Officer, Chainstack

Abstract
Businesses are actively experimenting with the blockchain and broader distributed ledger technology (DLT) for compelling use cases in supply chain, logistics, healthcare, and other markets. Building a decentralized solution might bring a lot of benefits with regards to transparency and streamlining of operations between multiple parties involved in the business process, but also introduces a completely new kind of risk. DLT is a complex, immature and rapidly changing technology, which requires a mindful approach to security and privacy in the enterprise context. In this talk, various cybersecurity challenges introduced by DLT implementation will be introduced together with potential solutions.

Yohei Oka

Forward Deployed Engineer, Quantstamp

Abstract
Smart contracts are immutable pieces of code on a blockchain which often handle large sums of money. Pre-deployment, many contracts undergo security audits and are subjected to static analysis in order to find errors and issues; however, there are no options for ensuring correctness of a contract once it has been deployed. This talk describes a novel decentralized protocol that provides a layer of economic assurance for the correctness of a deployed smart contract. The protocol deems a smart contract to be correct if it does not perform some user-defined behaviour. The protocol periodically rewards participants who place a collateral stake on the behaviour of a smart contract; participants lose this stake in the event that the contract misbehaves. The protocol enables economic assurance for arbitrary stakeholders of a contract, allowing these stakeholders to recover staked funds if a contract misbehaves. Stakeholders are not limited to the contract writers or owners, and anyone can stake collateral.

Dan Tinsley

Director - Cyber Capability, Architecture & Innovation, Standard Chartered Bank

Abstract
In the complex world of Blockchain implementation and pace of advanced cyber threats, traditional monolithic architecture models may not provide a fluid process for building scalable and resilient systems. By applying threat intelligence and adversary attack trees to an open reference architecture model, can this new method of defining security capabilities help large enterprises leverage emerging technologies securely?
In an very open debate, we will explore how can industry and academia work closely to reimagine security architecture for banking.

Yap Kwong Weng

Principal Advisor, Strategy and M&A, Managing Partner’s Office KPMG in Singapore

Abstract
One of the primary drivers of change identified is the role of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. I hope to bring more clarity to the debate about how AI could both create and limit economic opportunity. With 3000 personnel focusing on audit, tax and advisory services operating over five decades in Singapore, KPMG Singapore provides a unique vantage point into market developments, enabling us to support an examination of recent technology trends that could shape the future of industry in Singapore. Some analysis uncovers key trends from the Asean region as well as Singapore in these areas: (1) the continued rise of tech jobs and skills, and, in parallel, a growth in what I call “human-centric” jobs and skills that depend on intrinsically human qualities.

Yaoqi Jia

Head of Technology for Zilliqa

Zilliqa Workshop

Zilliqa is a new public blockchain platform for high-throughput applications. It brings the theory of sharding to practice with its novel protocol that increases transaction rates as its network expands. The latest experimental results demonstrate a throughput of more than 2,500 transactions per second, which is over 200 times higher than that of today's popular blockchains. In addition to its scalability, Zilliqa provides a secure and efficient smart contract layer to enable safe-by-design smart contract programming and enable formal verification.

The Zilliqa blockchain platform is tailored towards enabling high-throughput data-driven decentralized apps, designed to meet the scaling requirements of applications in areas such as digital marketing, payment, shared economy and rights management.

This 3 hour workshop is meant for people with programming knowledge who’re interested in learning how to develop a smart contract on Zilliqa.

Goal: By the end of the workshop, you’ll learn to write your first smart contract in Scilla.

Resources: Here are several technical documentations to help you get started and to get the most out of the workshop and hackathon:

1. Scilla Documentation: https://scilla.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

2. Scilla IDE: https://savant-ide.zilliqa.com/

3. TestRPC for Zilliqa (aka Kaya): https://github.com/Zilliqa/kaya

For any other resources, please refer to the Scilla webpage: https://scilla-lang.org/

What to bring?

1. Laptop with Linux installed.

2. If you intend to use Kaya, please follow README on Kaya Github repo.