---------------------------- Original Message ---------------------------- Subject: Fwd: [ece-dep] Lecture by Prof. Vassilis Zikas on Security of Blockchains, Friday 8/3, 17:00, Multimedia Amphitheater From: "Georgios Goumas" goumas@cslab.ece.ntua.gr Date: Wed, March 6, 2019 9:52 am To: "Parallel and Distributed Systems Group" pdsg@cslab.ece.ntua.gr --------------------------------------------------------------------------

-------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: [ece-dep] Lecture by Prof. Vassilis Zikas on Security of Blockchains, Friday 8/3, 17:00, Multimedia Amphitheater Date: Wed, 06 Mar 2019 08:59:15 +0200 From: Aris Pagourtzis pagour@cs.ntua.gr Reply-To: pagour@cs.ntua.gr Organisation: National Technical University of Athens To: Dep dep@ece.ntua.gr

Αγαπητοί συνάδελφοι,

Με χαρά σας προσκαλούμε σε ομιλία εξαιρετικού συναδέλφου, αποφοίτου του ΕΜΠ, που θα γίνει την Παρασκευή 8/3 στο Αμφ. Πολυμέσων, ώρα 17:00.

Παρακαλώ προωθήστε σε φοιτητές και συνεργάτες σας.

Με εκτίμηση,

Άρης Παγουρτζής

*Title:* Security of Blockchains against Incentive-Driven Attacks *Abstract: *In traditional cryptographic analysis, an application or protocol is deemed "secure" if it realizes its task against /*any */adversarial strategy, however mischievous. While this approach yields strong security guarantees, in many cases it's overpessimistic since it neglects the incentives that lead participants to deviate from their prescribed behavior, resulting in solutions that defend against unlikely attacks. In this talk we present the "Rational Protocol Design" (RPD) framework, which formally incorporates adversarial incentives into a composable cryptographic protocol design. We showcase the benefits of the framework by applying it?in combination with recent developments on the composable analysis of blockchains?to analyze blockchain protocols like Bitcoin. Our treatment captures, in a cryptographic framework, how knowledge of the attacker's incentives can be used to circumvent known impossibility results and/or derive a fallback rational-security notion. *?? * ** *Bio: Vassilis Zikas is an Associate Professor and Vice-Director of the Blockchain Technology Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh. He is also a Research Fellow (Area Leader: Secure Multiparty Computation) of the blockchain company IOHK. He was previously Assistant Professor at the Computer Science department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Senior Research Associate in Cryptography and Information Security at ETH Zurich, Research Fellow of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, UC Berkeley, and postdoctoral researcher at UCLA and at the University of Maryland. His research has been supported by a career development (Ambizione) grant and a postdoctoral fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation. *Vassilis received his PhD from the Computer Science Department of ETH Zurich and his diploma from the School of Applied Mathematical and Physical Sciences at NTUA, and has been a long-term affiliate of the Computation and Reasoning Lab (CoReLab) of NTUA.