Security & Privacy on the Blockchain (affiliated with Euro S&P 2021)
Cryptocurrencies have emerged as a promising instrument for financial transaction services that provide transparency and integrity in a decentralized fashion. Their clever combination of blockchains with new incentive mechanisms facilitate publicly verifiable and peer-to-peer transactions without a trusted central party. As a result, they have caught the attention of academic researchers, mainstream media, regulators, entrepreneurs and traditional financial institutions. As a subject for academic research, the global and self-enforcing nature of blockchains raises interesting questions and challenges across several disciplines including computer science, law, economics, and human-computer interaction.
Our workshop focuses on a wide-range of topics ranging from the scalability of cryptocurrencies, achieving and evaluating financial privacy in public blockchains, permissioning access to blockchains to satisfy regulatory requirements, aligning honest behaviour in blockchain ecosystems and smart contracts through the application of game theory and mechanism design, and the critical analysis of various applications of blockchain to other domains.
If you are promoting your paper on any social media channels be sure to use #IEEESB2021
News
September 5, 2021: We have slightly updated the program, please check below.
August 30, 2021: Participation instructions are now online here. There are still available slots for the lightning talks. Register your lightning talk here!
At least one author per paper presented in a co-located workshop must register as Workshop Author until July 31, 2021. Other authors who want to participate can register as Virtual Conference & Workshop Attendees. The registration fee includes the entrance to all IEEE EuroS&P 2021 conference and workshop sessions.
The registration fee includes the entrance to all IEEE EuroS&P 2021 conference and workshop sessions.
Please note: At least one author per paper presented at the main conference must register as Main Conference or Workshop Author.
Student registration:
Student registrations are only valid after a valid student ID has been uploaded through the registration process.
Please note: At least one author per paper presented at the main conference must register as Main Conference or Workshop Author.
Participation
The workshop will take place in the following zoom room.
To access the rooms a password is required, the password will be sent out (only) by the organizers to all registered participants. Therefore, if you have not registered yet, please do so now.
Everyone who is registered will receive a detailed access information including the password and therefore be able to access all workshops and the main conference.
Program
The workshop will take place on September 7. All times shown are in CEST.
14:00 - 14:10: Welcome and Opening remarks
14:10 - 15:00: Keynote: The Rise of Commitchains. Speaker: Patrick McCorry
15:00 - 15:15: Break
15:15 - 15:45: Session 1: Security vulnerabilities and attacks
Talk 1: Structural Attacks on Local Routing in Payment Channel Networks Ben Weintraub (Northeastern University), Cristina Nita-Rotaru (Northeastern University) and Stefanie Roos (Delft University of Technology)
Talk 2: ProMutator: Detecting Vulnerable Price Oracles in DeFi by Mutated Transactions Shih-Hung Wang (National Taiwan University), Chia-Chien Wu (National Taiwan University), Yu-Chuan Liang (National Taiwan University), Li-Hsun Hsieh (National Taiwan University) and Hsu-Chun Hsiao (National Taiwan University)
15:45 - 16:00: Break
16:00 - 16:45: Session 2: Hot Topics in Blockchains
Talk 1: Publicly Auditable MPC-as-a-Service with succinct verification and universal setup Sanket Kanjalkar (Blockstream), Ye Zhang (NYU), Shreyas Gandlur (Princeton), Andrew Miller (UIUC)
Talk 2: Modeling the Block Verification Time of Zcash Fabian Stiehle (TU Berlin), Erik Daniel (TU Berlin) and Florian Tschorsch (TU Berlin)
Lightning Talks:
ConFuzzius: A Data Dependency-Aware Hybrid Fuzzer for Smart Contracts Christof Ferreira Torres (University of Luxembourg)
16:45 - 16:50: Closing remarks
Lightning talks
The lightning talks session at IEEE S&B is intended to present work-in-progress from attendees (both from academia and industry) in the form of a short presentation. We strongly encourage submission of a lightning talk on a topic relevant to the workshop.
There are no format requirements for your talk and we do not provide any template. Sign-up for lightning talks will be open until September 6th, 2021, or until all the slots are taken. Register your lightning talk here.
Location
IEEE EuroS&P 2021 and all its workshops, including S&B, are converted into an all-digital event.
Committee
Program Chairs
Pedro Moreno-Sanchez (IMDEA Software Institute)
Marie Vasek (UCL)
Web Chair
Lukas Aumayr (TU Wien)
Program Committee
Mustafa Al-Bassam (University College London)
Zeta Avarikioti (ETH Zurich)
Sarah Azouvi (University College London)
Iddo Bentov (Cornell University)
Alex Biryukov (University of Luxembourg)
Rainer Boehme (University of Innsbruck)
Jeremy Clark (Concordia University)
Lisa Eckey (TU Darmstadt)
Oguzhan Ersoy (TU Delft)
Aaron Feickert (Cypher Stack)
Arthur Gervais (Imperial College London)
Bernhard Haslhofer (AIT-Austrian Institute of Technology)
Ethan Heilman (Boston University)
Jordi Herrera (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Aniket Kate (Purdue University)
Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias (IST Austria)
Duc Le (Purdue University)
Patrick McCorry (Newcastle University)
Andrew Miller (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Sri Aravindakrishnan Thyagarajan (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg)
Friedhelm Victor (TU Berlin)
Dionysis Zindros (University of Athens)
Call for Papers
The emergence of Bitcoin and decentralized cryptocurrencies, and their fundamental innovation---blockchains---have allowed for entities to trade and interact without a central trusted third party. This has led to a captivating research activity in multiple domains and across different venues, such as top security and distributed systems conferences and journals, as well as a vibrant startup rush on this new technology.
The fifth IEEE Security and Privacy on the Blockchain (S&B) workshop aims to unite interested scholars as well as industrial members from all relevant disciplines who study and work in the space of blockchains. We solicit previously unpublished papers offering novel contributions in both cryptocurrencies and wider blockchain research. Papers may present advances in the theory, design, implementation, analysis, verification, or empirical evaluation and measurement of existing systems. Papers that shed new light on past or informally known results by means of sound formal theory or through empirical analysis are welcome. Suggested contribution topics include (but are not limited to) empirical and theoretical studies of:
Adoption of blockchains in developing countries
Anonymity and privacy-enhancing technologies
Applications using or built on top of blockchains
Atomic Swapping
Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, Zcash protocol, other coins and extensions (cryptography, scripting/smart contract language etc.)
Business models for blockchains (both new and new integrations into existing)
Case studies (e.g., of adoption, attacks, forks, scams etc.)
Formal verification of blockchain protocols and Smart Contracts
Fraud detection and financial crime prevention
Governance
Identity, Identification and trust in blockchain systems
Interfacing fiat and cryptocurrencies
Intermediates in different industries and their future
Internet of things (IoT) and blockchains
Legal and policy implications of Smart Contracts
Legal, ethical, and societal aspects of virtual currencies
Legal status of crowdfunding for new blockchain projects (ICO/TGE)
Novel applications of the blockchain
Off-chain payment channels
Peer-to-peer broadcast networks/topologies
Permissioned (e.g. Hyperledger) and permissionless (e.g. Bitcoin) blockchains
Proof-of-work, and its alternatives (e.g., proof-of-stake, proof-of-burn, and virtual
mining)
Real-world measurements and metrics
Regulation and law enforcement
Relation to other payment systems
Scalability and scalable services for blockchain systems
Security of blockchains
Smart Contract Programming Languages and VM's
Transaction graph analysis
Usability and user studies
This topic list is not meant to be exhaustive. S&B is interested in all aspects of the blockchain research relating to security and privacy. Papers that are considered out of scope may be rejected without full review. We encourage submissions that are "far-reaching" and "risky."
Instructions for Paper Submissions
All submissions must be original work; the submitter must clearly document any overlap with previously published or simultaneously submitted papers from any of the authors. Failure to point out and explain overlap will be grounds for rejection. Simultaneous submission of the same paper to another venue with proceedings or a journal is not allowed and will be grounds for automatic rejection. Contact the program committee chair if there are questions about this policy.
Anonymous Submission
Papers must be submitted in a form suitable for anonymous review: no author names or affiliations may appear on the title page, and papers should avoid revealing their identity in the text. When referring to your previous work, do so in the third person, as though it were written by someone else. Only blind the reference itself in the (unusual) case that a third-person reference is infeasible. Contact the program chairs if you have any questions. Papers that are not properly anonymized may be rejected without review.
Page Limit and Formatting
Short papers may not exceed 4 pages and full papers may not exceed 10 pages not including references and appendix.
Papers must be typeset in LaTeX in A4 format (not "US Letter") using the IEEE conference proceeding template we supply (eurosp-2021-template.zip). We suggest you first compile the supplied LaTeX source as is, checking that you obtain the same PDF as the one supplied, and then write your paper into the LaTeX template, replacing the boilerplate text. Please do not use other IEEE templates. Failure to adhere to the page limit and formatting requirements can be grounds for rejection.
Submission
Submissions must be in Portable Document Format (.pdf). Authors should pay special attention to unusual fonts, images, and figures that might create problems for reviewers. Your document should render correctly in Adobe Reader XI and when printed in black and white.
Papers must be submitted online and submissions may be updated at any time until the deadline for submissions.
Publication and Presentation
Authors are responsible for obtaining appropriate publication clearances. One of the authors of the accepted paper is expected to present the paper at the conference. Submissions received after the submission deadline or failing to conform to the submission guidelines risk rejection without review. Accepted publications can be subject to publication in IEEE proceedings. If authors wish to not publish in IEEE, we will also offer an extended abstract version for publishing. This option will be available when papers are accepted. For more information, contact the chairs.