Workshop Information Synopsis Program References

Workshop Information

Time:	Saturday, April 27m 2019, 9 am - noon
Room:	GHC 4405 Gates and Hillman Centers
Instructors:	Jan Hoffmann and Bryan Parno

Synopsis

Smart contracts, popularized by cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, are programs that run atop financial infrastructure and command the flow of money according to user-defined algorithms. Such contracts can implement new, decentralized financial instruments or even virtual corporations defined only by the bundle of smart contracts programmatically governing their behavior. For example, an eBay-like smart contract could directly connect buyers with sellers, support a variety of auction mechanisms, and manage necessary payments (including escrow), without the transaction charges currently imposed by eBay, PayPal, and the credit card companies. In general, moving business processes into smart contracts promises to lower costs, reduce friction, and unleash innovation by eliminating intermediaries and automating settlements.

However, programming smart contracts requires a deep understanding of cryptographic techniques, a non-standard execution cost model, and economic mechanism design. Existing smart-contract programming languages provide little support for such reasoning; indeed, contract vulnerabilities have already led to multi-million-dollar thefts.

In this workshop, we will introduce the ideas behind blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and smart contracts. We’ll discuss some of the security challenges unique to these new technologies, as well as some of our on-going research into how to prevent or mitigate these new vulnerabilities.

Topics

• Blockchains
• Applications of blockchains
• Consensus, mining, and hashing
• Signatures
• Cryptocurrencies
• Smart contracts
• Applications of smart contracts
• Risks of smart contracts
• How to get started using blockchains
• Blockchain research at Carnegie Mellon

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