Abstract: Quantum computers have the potential to disrupt elliptic curve cryptosystems and other authentication mechanisms used in existing blockchains. In this talk we discuss what the future of blockchain technology entails in a post-quantum setting and showcase some applications of isogenies to blockchain authentication.

Bio: David Jao is a professor at the University of Waterloo and Chief Cryptographer at evolutionQ. Prof. Jao received his PhD from Harvard University and worked as a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research prior to joining Waterloo. He is the inventor of SIDH and principal submitter of SIKE, a (since broken) round 4 candidate in the NIST post-quantum standardization process.

Abstract: The popularity and growth of blockchain and crypto has many observers scratching their heads. For example, how does something like bitcoin grow in value and users with no central authority, marketing, or board of directors? Dogecoin may help answer this question. Blockchain community advocates maligned it since its inception in 2013 as the first meme coin. Its creators intended it to convey the fun of meme culture and to largely be a joke. It stuck around in the shallows of the coingecko rankings while many of its early stage peers failed or turned into zombie projects.Something changed in 2021 and it rocketed into the top 10 among with the most popular of coins and projects, such as bitcoin. This talk explores how memes are more than ephemeral content. They are communicative acts of sharing and negotiating social values and cultural norms. Dogecoin embodies meme culture and how value is driven by digital networks and communities in crypto rather than corporations.

Bio: Peter Chow-White is Director of the genalab and Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University. He has been researching the social and economic impacts of Internet for over 20 years. He does this by investigating the early stages of adoption of large sociotechnical trends like big data, social media, and blockchain. Dr. Chow-White's approach to professional practice engages scholars across the academy, policy makers, regulators, and industry.

Abstract: The untrusted centralized nature of energy markets and EV charging infrastructures result in several privacy and security threats to EV user’s private information. These security and privacy threats include targeted advertisements, privacy leakage, selling data to third parties, etc. In this work, we propose BlockEV, a blockchain-based efficient CS selection protocol for EVs to ensure the security and privacy of the EV users, availability of the reserved time slots at CSs, high Quality of Service (QoS) and enhanced EV user comfort. First, a blockchain-based framework is introduced to implement secure charging services and trusted reservation for EVs with the execution of smart contract. Second, we focus on the efficient CS selection and propose a mechanism for EVs to select the CS locally without sharing private information to CS, while fulfilling their service requirements.

Bio: I am currently employed as a postdoctoral researcher at ETS Montreal and Hydro-Quebec. I received my Ph.D. from the Département de génie logiciel et des TI of the University ETS Montreal, Quebec in 2022. I received master's degree from National University of Sciences & Technology, Pakistan. My research activities focus on the integration of blockchain technology within energy systems. My current research interests include IoT security, electric vehicles, privacy-preserving techniques and blockchain.

Abstract: We propose a groundbreaking system called "Calosys," a blockchain-based P2P lending platform that employs augmented reality (AR) and smart contracts to create a token-based loan system that caters to entrepreneurs' marketing needs. Our system employs innovative lending processes, utilizing smart contracts that ensure secure transactions while allocating loan money for small business marketing activities. By utilizing augmented reality (AR), Calosys enhances customer engagement, boosting success rates and benefits for all stakeholders involved.

Bio: Koosha Esmaeilzadeh Khorasani obtained his bachelor's degree from the Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran, Iran. At present, he is enrolled in the University of Manitoba in Canada, where he is working towards a master's degree in computer science. His areas of research focus on distributed systems and blockchain technologies.

Bio: KIARASH SHAMSI received the B.S. degree from the Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran, and the M.S. degree from the University of Science and Culture, Tehran. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in computer science with the University of Manitoba, Canada. His research interests include data science, machine learning, and blockchain technologies.

Abstract: Blockchains are decentralized; are they genuinely? We analyze blockchain decentralization's often overlooked but quantifiable dimension: geospatial distribution of transaction processing. Blockchains bring with them the potential for geospatially distributed transaction processing. They enable validators from geospatially distant locations to partake in consensus protocols; we refer to them as minority validators. Based on our observations, in practice, most validators are often geographically concentrated in proximity. Furthermore, we observed that minority validators tend not to meet the performance requirements, often misidentified as crash failures. Consequently, they are subject to punishment by jailing (removal from the validator set) and/or slashing (penalty in native tokens). Our emulations, under controlled conditions, demonstrate the same results, raising serious concerns about the potential for the geospatial centralization of validators. To address this, we developed a solution that easily integrates with consensus protocols, and we demonstrated its effectiveness.

Bio: Shashank Motepalli, a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, specializes in blockchain systems under the guidance of Prof. Hans-Arno Jacobsen at MSRG. He is also a Schwartz Reisman Institute of Technology and Society graduate affiliate. Shashank’s research focuses on the decentralization of consensus protocols for permissionless blockchains. Shashank contributed to open-source projects such as 0L.network and DBpedia. He holds an integrated Masters in Information Technology degree from the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore.

Abstract: We will present modern algorithms, mainly based in Zero Knowledge Proofs, that allow for transparently proving liabilities. This set of interesting cryptographic primitives was originally explored as a method to prove financial solvency, but as we will show, they are directly applicable in domains outside finance, including transparent and private donations, voting, gambling, and publicly verifiable official reports, such as COVID-19 daily cases and unemployment rates. These applications share a common nature in incentives: it is not in prover's interest to increase the total liabilities. Finally, along with proposing solutions, a list of realistic blockers, considerations and outstanding vulnerable implementations will hopefully depict the full spectrum of what is possible today and what the community should learn from past mistakes.

Bio: Kostas Kryptos Chalkias is an applied cryptographer having led the crypto and security teams of at least 3 blockchains, R3 Corda, Meta’s Libra (Diem) and now Sui as a cofounder of Mysten Labs. His work expands in ZKP (coauthor of Winterfell and HashWires), Timed-Release Encryption, Solvency Proofs and optimized BLS and EdDSA signatures. Occasionally a white-hat hacker having idenitifed serious vulnerabilities in numerous cryptosystems and smart contracts in the past.

Abstract: Finding strong market demand for a new product is a challenge for any startup. Now add in tokens, airdrops, rollercoaster prices, speculators, hacks, regulatory uncertainty, and rug pulls. These are the dynamics that crypto innovators face. In this talk, we will unpack these challenges, discuss some of the common pitfalls that are specific to crypto, and consider how to cut through the volatility to uncover the wants and needs of users.

Bio: Jill is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Espresso Systems, working on bringing privacy and scalability to Web3. Previously, Jill ran crypto investments for early stage venture capital fund, Slow Ventures. Jill is also a co-founder of the Open Money Initiative, a non-profit organization that researched how those in restricted economies manage their money. She started her career as a fixed income trader at Goldman Sachs. She received an A.B. in Classics with highest honors from Harvard University and a MSc. from Oxford where she conducted economic research on use of bitcoin in contexts of capital controls.

Abstract: Today there is a growing public trust gap regarding adoption of emerging and existing technologies. By working together to understand and address this public trust gap confidence to adopt new technologies and models has the potential to grow. With this purpose the Digital Identity & Authentication Council of Canada (DIACC) has performed annual public perception research. This presentation will review the results of its 2022 Digital Identity Perspectives Research. The study provides insight into Canadians’ attitudes and perceptions toward digital identity, privacy, and their adoption of digital wallets. The results of DIACC's Digital Identity Perspectives Research provide valuable insights into the attitudes and perceptions of Canadians towards personal data control and privacy. Personal data control and privacy are foundational building blocks that support good design to build confidence and adoption of distributed, blockchain, and web3 based technologies.

Abstract: As President of the Digital ID & Authentication Council of Canada (DIACC), Joni builds on 20 years of experience in digital identity innovations, frameworks, standards, policy, and business development. She helps DIACC fulfill its vision of unlocking the interoperability of public and private sector capabilities by establishing an identity trust assurance framework that will grow Canada's economy. Joni builds impactful relationships and formalizes strategic partnerships between and across public and private sector organizations.

Joni is honoured to serve as an individual representative of Canada in the G7 Digital Governance Task Force. She also serves as co-Chair of CANARIE's Trust and Identity Advisory Committee. Joni previously served as co-Chair of Working Group 1 of the Standards Council of Canada's Data Governance Standardization Collaboration.

Abstract: Any CBDC system, if and when deployed into production, is expected to be in production for a long period of time, on the scale of decades. As such, crypto-agility is foundational to the overall security posture and must be considered from a system design perspective. The advent of quantum computing and quantum-safe cryptographic primitives acts as a driver towards considering crypto-agility from a practical perspective. The system could be designed to either incorporate quantum-safe algorithms from inception or develop a path towards future integration of quantum-safe algorithms. In this work, the performance impact of various cryptographic algorithms and design choices on an operational CBDC model is explored, with a focus on the TLS exchange as a foundational block for establishing a secure channel between two entities. The memory consumption and latency of multiple implementations of key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) and signatures were benchmarked against the baseline of ECDH+ECDSA. Four distinct configurations were evaluated, namely typical desktop clients, consensus protocols, smartphones and resource-constrained IoT devices. Experimental results suggest that quantum-safe algorithms are competitive to classical algorithms under specific configurations, and could be considered for inclusion at the design stage. Certain limitations were observed in benchmarks with IoT devices, requiring future study as hardware evolves.

Bio: Cyrus Minwalla is a researcher at the Financial Technology Research group at the Bank of Canada leading the security work on central bank digital currencies. His research interests include digital currencies, cryptography, embedded devices, and hardware security for resource-constrained devices in payments and IoT. Cyrus received the Bank of Canada’s Award of Excellence in 2020 and 2022, and was selected as NRC’s Top Young Scientist Under 40 in 2017. He received his B.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Engineering from York University, and is a licensed Professional Engineer in the province of Ontario.

Abstract: Web3 merges Blockchain, AI, IoT and Spatial UX into a technology platform that will change business and society. This presentation will look at the force magnifying effects of the Web3 components and how they are likely to change the world. It will look at emerging use cases in several industries and in civil society. It will highlight opportunities and pitfalls.

Bio: Douglas Heintzman is the Chief Catalyst at the Blockchain Research Institute. He is a 30-year veteran of the tech industry. He was the head of technical strategy at IBM Software group as well as IBM’s Chief Open Source Officer. He has been a COO, a founder, a management consultant, and a VP of strategy at a blockchain platform company.

BRI: The Blockchain Research Institute is the world’s leading independent think tank focused on the impact of Web3 on business and society.

Abstract: For years, the energy sector has grappled with a digitization “ceiling”, hitting a point of stagnation in its journey towards comprehensive digital transformation. This presentation will explore how emerging technologies, specifically blockchain, hold the potential to shatter this ceiling, heralding a new era of operational efficiency and transparency. Central to our discussion is Neoflow, an innovative product leading the blockchain revolution in the oil and gas industry. Collaborating with Homeland Security, Neoflow is pioneering a transformation in cross-border clearance processes, facilitating levels of security and traceability previously unattainable, steering the industry towards end-to-end digitization — a revolution that parallels the transformative impact of the internet's advent on end users. In this talk we will discuss the transition from barrels to bytes and the potential of blockchain to redefine traditional practices within the energy sector and other traditional industries.

Abstract: Abstract. The arithmetic of computing multiple scalar multiplications in an elliptic curve group then adding them together is called multi-scalar multiplication (MSM). MSM over fixed points dominates the time consumption in the pairing-based trusted setup zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge (zkSNARK), thus for practical applications we would appreciate fast algorithms to compute it. This paper proposes a bucket set construction that can be utilized in the context of Pippenger’s bucket method to speed up MSM over fixed points with the help of precomputation. If instantiating the proposed construction over BLS12-381 curve, when computing n-scalar multiplications for n = 2^e (10 ≤ e ≤ 21), theoretical analysis indicates that the proposed construction saves more than 21% computational cost compared to Pippenger’s bucket method, and that it saves 2.6% to 9.6% computational cost compared to the most popular variant of Pippenger’s bucket method. Finally, our experimental result demonstrates the feasibility of accelerating the computation of MSM over fixed points using large precomputation tables as well as the effectiveness of our new construction.

Bio: I am a PhD student in the communication security lab (ComSec) at University of Waterloo under the supervision of Prof. Guang Gong. I am working on pairing-based cryptography, zkSNARKs and privacy-preserving blockchains. I am a staunch supporter of empowering blockchain privacy features utilizing zkSNARKs.

Abstract: An exchange between two parties is called "fair" when both parties receive what they agreed to or neither party gains anything. Fair exchange of digital goods over the internet has been shown to be impossible to achieve without the help of a trusted third party (TTP). Recent research FairSwap (Dziembowski et al.) and OptiSwap (Eckey et al.) consider an exchange between a Buyer who is willing to pay $p$ digital coins to a Seller in exchange for a digital item $x$. These works present protocols that achieve a fairness without a TTP by deploying a smart contract executed on a blockchain. Both protocols require the Buyer to reveal part of their purchase to the smart contract in order to complain about a Seller who tries to cheat. We observe that leaking part of the purchase in this way can motivate an honest party to forgo their fairness guarantee in order protect their sensitive information. We discuss the interplay between privacy and fairness. Then present privacy enhanced versions of FairSwap and OptiSwap that prevent this leakage using circuit randomization techniques first proposed to protect secrets in hardware circuits.

Bio: Preston is a PhD student under the supervision of Dr. Rei Safavi-Naini at the University of Calgary. Their research interests include privacy enhancing technologies, digital identity management, and blockchain. The research presented today was done in collaboration with Sepideh Avizheh and Dr. Rei Safavi-Naini.

Abstract: Outsourcing computation enables a weak client to expand its computational power without requiring the need to plan and maintain local computing infrastructure. A basic requirement of outsourcing computation is to trust the result of the computation. We propose a system for delegation of computation to two cloud servers using a smart contract that guarantees correct computation results as long as at least one server is honest. This scheme follows from Refereed Delegation Computation (RDoC) framework of Canetti, Riva, and Rothblum that assumes a trusted client and uses two cloud servers, where one of the servers arbitrarily deviates from the protocol. Using a smart contract significantly relaxes trust assumption on the client and minimizes the client’s computation and interactions with the servers. However, direct use of RDoC in smart contract setting will be insecure because of copy attack where a server copies the result of the other server and will receive the reward without having done the work. We propose systems with proved security that protect against this attack and show their extension to secure multi-server setting where only one out of n servers is honest. We also discuss our implementation and experiment results using Ethereum smart contracts.

Bio: Sepideh Avizheh is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Computer Science at University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, working under supervision of Dr. Reihaneh (Rei) Safavi-Naini. She received her M.Sc. and B.Sc., both in Electrical Engineering, from Sharif University of Technology and Shariaty Technical College, Iran, respectively. Sepideh has been working with ISPIA, University of Calgary, since 2017. Her research interests include applied cryptography, provable security, blockchain, and smart contract-based computation.