InfoSec seminar: Chainspace: A sharded smart contracts platform
Mustafa Al-Bassam, a research student at UCL Computer Science will present the design, rationale, and details of Chainspace.
About
Chainspace is a decentralized infrastructure, known as a distributed ledger, that supports user defined smart contracts and executes user-supplied transactions on their objects. The correct execution of smart contract transactions is verifiable by all. The system is scalable, by sharding state and the execution of transactions, and using S-BAC, a distributed commit protocol, to guarantee consistency. Chainspace is secure against subsets of nodes trying to compromise its integrity or availability properties through Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT), and extremely high-auditability, non-repudiation and ‘blockchain’ techniques. Even when BFT fails, auditing mechanisms are in place to trace malicious participants. We present the design, rationale, and details of Chainspace; we argue through evaluating an implementation of the system about its scaling and other features; we illustrate a number of privacy-friendly smart contracts for smart metering, polling and banking and measure their performance.
Visitors from outside UCL please email in advance.
Mustafa Al Bassam
PhD student
UCL Computer Science
Mustafa is a PhD student at the Information Security Research Group of the Department of Computer Science at University College London. He joined in October 2016; his supervisors are Professor George Danezis and Dr Sarah Meiklejohn. Mustafa’s research interests include the intersections of peer-to-peer systems, distributed ledgers and information security.
