at SCMS COCHIN Campus, Kerala, India.
The blockchain emerged as a unique distributed consensus arrangement that allows transactions, and any kind of data, to be securely stored and verified without a centralized authority. For a while, the concept of blockchain was paired with Bitcoin, a well-known proof of work hash-based mechanism. Today, there are plenty of alternatives to blockchains. Some are simple variants of Bitcoin, whereas others significantly differ in their design and provide different functional and security features. From the research reports it comes out that there is an increased interest in the use of blockchains across many applications and a significant investment by various industries in their development. This clearly indicates that the research community is in search of a simple and scalable blockchain technology which can be implemented across the industries.
As the security and privacy is a key evaluation parameter in the practical deployments of the blockchain platforms or the blockchain-based applications, some researches have been conducted in the area of cryptography and cryptographic techniques, which are considered as the underlying fundaments of the blockchain. However, on the one hand, there are still many cryptographic techniques that can provide desirable security properties have not been well-studied or well-applied in blockchain. On the other hand, some cryptographic primitives having been used in existing blockchain systems are high consuming in computation or communication, which greatly impacts the usability and practicability of the blockchain. Exploring lightweight cryptographic alternatives and new promising cryptographic techniques for blockchain is still a challenging research direction. The blockchain is likely to bring in considerable change to a large number of systems and businesses. Distributed protection, and therefore privacy and security, is the core of the blockchain technologies and thus has the potential to either make them a major success or cause them to fail miserably.
The conference aims to discuss the most relevant ongoing research efforts in blockchain security and privacy. Apart from the sessions by eminent speakers discussing the challenges and solutions , research papers are invited on the following topics (but are not limited to) :
