Keynote Talk SBC ’21, June 7, 2021, Virtual Event, Hong Kong
Towards Secure and Scalable Blockchain Technologies
Ghassan Karame
NEC Labs Europe
Heidelberg, Germany
[email protected]ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The blockchain technology is rapidly gaining grounds as a key Blockchain security; Lightweight client privacy.
technology, especially in the financial and supply chain manage- ACM Reference Format:
ment sectors. This is largely due to the ability of the technology Ghassan Karame. 2021. Towards Secure and Scalable Blockchain Tech-
to (i) efficiently manage the sharing of digital resources between a nologies. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Security
large number of stakeholders and (ii) to efficiently manage disputes in Blockchain and Cloud Computing (SBC ’21), June 7, 2021, Virtual Event,
arising in the process. Hong Kong. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/
In spite of its many advantages, experience with existing blockchain 3457977.3460634
proposals reveals that there are still many challenges that need to
be overcome prior to any large scale industrial adoption, namely: BIOGRAPHY
Scalability Existing permissionless blockchains (e.g., Bitcoin) Ghassan leads the Security research group of NEC Labs in Germany.
are able to scale to a considerable number of nodes at the He joined NEC Labs in April 2012 as a research staff member. He
expense of attained throughput (e.g., Bitcoin can only achieve holds a PhD degree in Computer Science from ETH Zurich. Before
few transactions per second [2]). On the other hand, permission- joining NEC Labs, he was working as a postdoctoral researcher in
based blockchains can achieve relatively higher throughput, the Institute of Information Security of ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
but can only scale to few hundred nodes. However, one Ghassan is interested in all aspects of security and privacy with a
needs to cater for both performance and scalability to meet focus on cloud security, IoT security, network security, and Blockchain
industrial standards. security. He is the author of the “Bitcoin and Blockchain security”
Privacy of lightweight clients Most open blockchain plat- book, and an inventor of many patents in the blockchain and secu-
forms support lightweight clients, targeted for devices like rity areas. He is also a member of the IEEE and the ACM.
smartphones, that only download and verify a small part
of the chain. Here, clients connect to a full node that has
access to the complete blockchain and can assist the client
in transaction confirmation. As the full node has to learn all
transactions issued and received by the requesting client to
verify their correctness, such action obviously violates user
privacy [1].
In this talk, we plan to overview a number of security challenges
pertaining to existing blockchains—effectively capturing almost
8 years of research in this area of work. Moreover, we plan to
discuss the performance limitations of existing blockchain-based
consensus algorithms and explore different concepts leveraging
trusted execution environments (TEEs) to enhance the scalability
and security of existing consensus algorithms [3]. REFERENCES
Finally, we will discuss the privacy provisions of existing light- [1] Arthur Gervais, Srdjan Capkun, Ghassan O. Karame, and Damian Gruber. 2014. On
the privacy provisions of Bloom filters in lightweight bitcoin clients. In Proceedings
weight client implementations and explore the solution space to of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC 2014, New
enhance user privacy by leveraging functionality from TEEs [4]. Orleans, LA, USA, December 8-12, 2014. 326–335. https://doi.org/10.1145/2664243.
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[2] Arthur Gervais, Ghassan O. Karame, Karl Wüst, Vasileios Glykantzis, Hubert
CCS CONCEPTS Ritzdorf, and Srdjan Capkun. 2016. On the Security and Performance of Proof of
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(Eds.). ACM, 3–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/2976749.2978341
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or [3] Jian Liu, Wenting Li, Ghassan O. Karame, and N. Asokan. 2019. Scalable Byzantine
classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed Consensus via Hardware-Assisted Secret Sharing. IEEE Trans. Computers 68, 1
for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation (2019), 139–151. https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2018.2860009
on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. [4] Sinisa Matetic, Karl Wüst, Moritz Schneider, Kari Kostiainen, Ghassan Karame,
For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). and Srdjan Capkun. 2019. BITE: Bitcoin Lightweight Client Privacy using Trusted
SBC ’21, June 7, 2021, Virtual Event, Hong Kong Execution. In 28th USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX Security 2019, Santa Clara,
© 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). CA, USA, August 14-16, 2019, Nadia Heninger and Patrick Traynor (Eds.). USENIX
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-8405-6/21/06. Association, 783–800. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity19/
https://doi.org/10.1145/3457977.3460634 presentation/matetic
