IC3 Meetup in the Bay Area - Hosted by VMware in Palo Alto

Schedule:

6:00-6:30pm - Arrivals and Networking.

6:30-7:15pm - Presentation (Live Streamed via Zoom https://VMware.zoom.us/j/6938291148)

7:15-7:30pm - Q/A.

7:30-8:00pm - More Networking.

"Privacy-preserving Smart Contracts at Scale"

The speaker is Noah Johnson, a PhD student in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, advised by Prof. Dawn Song, IC3 co-Director. Noah is CPO and co-founder of Oasis Labs. Noah has expertise in program analysis, security policy enforcement, and privacy-preserving techniques. Noah recently developed the first practical system to provide differential privacy for general statistical queries. This work was featured in Wired and Gizmodo, and is in use today by Uber. Noah has received several awards as a graduate student including the Signature Innovation Fellowship, Sevin Rosen Award for Innovation, and Tony Leong Lim Pre-Doctoral Award. Previously Noah co-led a team of students in the development of DroidBlaze, a platform for automated security analysis and policy enforcement for mobile applications. Noah and advisor Dawn Song commercialized the DroidBlaze platform by founding Ensighta Security, which was acquired by FireEye in 2012.

In this talk we'll describe Oasis, a platform for privacy-preserving smart contracts at scale. Oasis addresses two critical issues of today's platforms: poor scalability and a requirement that all data is public. These platforms cannot support many exciting use-cases which have complex application logic (e.g. machine learning) or require protection of user or application secrets (e.g. data markets). Oasis is a layer 1 blockchain platform that scales to complex workloads such as machine learning and protects data via secure computing techniques. We'll summarize the Oasis protocol and discuss real-world applications built on Oasis such as credit scoring, medical data sharing, and blockchain-based games. We'll describe how Oasis enables these exciting applications to run directly on-chain, avoiding the need for off-chain computation.

About IC3: The Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts (IC3) is an unrivaled center for interdisciplinary talent that uniquely meets the blockchain community's urgent need for world-class expertise spanning cryptography, distributed systems, programming languages, game theory, and system security techniques. IC3 is by far the world’s leading academic initiative devoted to blockchain research - with sixteen faculty spanning eight campuses at top universities in four countries (UC Berkeley, Cornell, Cornell Tech, EPFL, ETH-Zurich, the Technion, University College London, and Univ. of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign). In addition to computer science, its expertise includes finance and technology law.

IC3 scientists have produced some of the most widely cited academic papers and influential blockchain ideas. Their best known results include: (1) Identification of vulnerabilities such as selfish mining; (2) a list second to none of leading consensus algorithms in current use; and pioneering work in (3) trusted computing for blockchains, (4) oracles, (5) applications of zero-knowledge proofs, and (6) smart contract integrity.

IC3’s growing roster of industry partners includes Aeternity, Chain, Chainlink, Cisco, Cypherium, Digital Asset, Fidelity Labs, IBM, Intel, J.P. Morgan, Microsoft, Siemens, Tezos, and VMware. IC3 experts are cited (on nearly a daily basis) by the media – Forbes, Fortune, Wall Street Journal, etc.