This year EPFL hosted a Blockchain Summer School from the 21st to the 24th of June. UCL was well represented with Sarah Meiklejohn presenting two talks whilst Sarah Azouvi, Patrick McCorry, Mustafa Al-Bassam and Alexander Hicks also attended. This blog post is a joint effort from the four of us, aimed at highlighting the talks presented last week.
The Summer School featured talks on several aspects of blockchain technology ranging from classical distributed computing, security of smart contracts in Ethereum and proving the security of proof of work/stake. Here, we will provide a small summary for each of the talks. Slides can be found by clicking on each talk on the school’s program page.
TLS-N: Non-repudiation over TLS Enabling Ubiquitous Content Signing for Disintermediation by Arthur Gervais: Gervais’ talk highlights that a slight modification to TLS can allow a smart contract to verify the authenticity of data received from website. Essentially, at the end of the TLS session the server signs evidence of the TLS session if requested by the client. This evidence is verified and stored by the smart contract. It is also worth mentioning that the protocol relies on redactable signatures that ensures private data isn’t revealed.
Town Crier: An Authenticated Data Feed for Smart Contracts – Ari Juels: Juel’s talk highlights that trusted execution environments can be leveraged to build authenticated data feeds. This trusted hardware communicates with the website before sending the data to the smart contract. It is responsible for setting up a HTTPS session and fetching data from a website before sending the data to the smart contract. TownCrier is currently implemented using Intel SGX and is currently released for testing.
It is also worth mentioning that Juels beautifully provided a good definition for a smart contract:
“A smart contract is a trusted third party with public state.”
This is one of the reasons why cryptography and smart contracts are a great combination. The contract can ensure the cryptography is faithfully executed, whereas the cryptography can provide integrity and confidentiality for data used by the contract.