Dr. Yuhong Liu, Santa Clara University
In this talk, Dr. Yuhong Liu will discuss some key characteristics of blockchain and a few promising applications of blockchain that can facilitate security and trust among multiple parties. Some examples include applying blockchain to secure software updates for resource-constrained IoT networks; designing a secure and efficient multi-signature scheme to facilitate multi-party approval process on Fabric, an enterprise blockchain platform; and facilitating fair trading of digital-goods via a blockchain based proxy re-encryption scheme.
With the prosperity of edge computing, massive users and devices at the edge of the computer networks are more actively involved in the networks, pushing the information collection, computation, storage, and communications more towards end users. In these more decentralized systems, how to enable efficient and trustworthy interactions among different parties becomes an essential issue.
Blockchain has been considered as a promising approach to facilitate the establishment of decentralized trustworthy computing systems with non-repudiated information records. With the emergence of Bitcoin, blockchain has attracted wide attention as a secure and decentralized platform to enable peer-to-peer exchanges of digital currency. However, Bitcoin can only support simple scripts, which limit its major applications to only decentralized finance. Ethereum is the most well-known permissionless blockchain platform that generalizes the system as a state machine and enables smart contracts, a piece of code that can support complex logic and be self-executed when certain conditions are met. Such generalization enables blockchain to potentially serve as a computing infrastructure to facilitate secure and decentralized interactions among any parties without making high trust assumptions about them.