FOCODILE 2022 - 3rd International Workshop on Foundations of Consensus and Distributed Ledgers

FOCODILE 2022 is one of the workshops at DisCoTec 2022, the 17th International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques.

Scope

FOCODILE is a forum to exchange ideas and recent research findings on theoretical foundations of consensus and blockchain technology. Topics include, but are not limited to:

Extended Abstract

FOCODILE has no formal proceedings. Novel research works or already published papers are welcome (in the form of extended abstracts).

Important Dates

Submission information

Extended abstract (2 pages + references) have to be submitted in PDF format using the EasyChair submission page https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=focodile2022

Conference Venue

IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca San Francesco Complex Piazza S. Francesco, 19 - 55100 Lucca, LU

How to reach San Francesco Complex

By Car Lucca is situated on the highway line that connects Florence to Pisa and Versilia, called “Autostrada A11 Firenze-Mare”. If you find yourself at Florence or Pisa airport, please follow A11 directions. The nearest highway exit to the IMT Campus is Lucca-Est. You can leave your car at the Mazzini underground parking (Via dei Bacchettoni) that is next to the Campus and reachable from Porta Elisa.

By Train The Lucca Train Station is located in Piazzale Ricasoli, near to Porta San Pietro. It is directly connected to the main Tuscan provinces and tourist locations such as Pisa, Viareggio, Montecatini, Pistoia and Florence. San Francesco Complex is easily reachable by foot from the Train Station. You can check connections and timetables on the Trenitalia website.

By Plane From Pisa

The nearest airport to Lucca is the Galileo Galilei Internation Airport of Pisa. Pisa Airport – Pisa Centrale Railway Station: transfer is provided by the Pisa Mover Bus service with a timetable departure of every 10 minutes and a journey time of 5/8 minutes. At the Airport, the stop is located just outside the check-in area. At the Pisa Centrale Railway Station, the stop is located close to platform 14, from which you can easily reach the other platforms and station’s main entrance. The ticket cost is € 2.70.

The CoTaPi taxi company is available at Pisa Airport. A taxi from Pisa Airport to Lucca center could cost around € 50.00 and would take about 30 minutes.

Trains to Lucca depart from Pisa Centrale Railway Station. Details are available on the Trenitalia website or via Google Transit. Direct trains are Regional trains, the journey is a little over 30 minutes and the ticket costs € 3.60. It is not possible to purchase Regional tickets more than 7 days in advance of the day of travel. Trains are less frequent on the weekend.

Bus travel from Pisa to Lucca is provided by VAI Bus: connections and timetables available on the website.

By Plane From Florence

The School can also be easily reached from the Amerigo Vespucci International Airport of Florence.

The easiest way to reach IMT from the Florence Airport is by taxi. You can catch a taxi from just outside the airport for an approximate cost of € 100.

The alternative is to take a city line bus to the Santa Maria Novella Railway Station, in order to catch a connecting train to Lucca. The transfer is provided by “Vola in Bus” of the ATAF Company: a bus leaves approximately every 30 minutes, 7 days a week, with a travel time of 25 minutes. Ticket price is € 4.50.

From Santa Maria Novella Railway Station the regional trains depart every 30 minutes approximately, timetables available on Trenitalia website.

Registration

More info can be found to the registration page

Program

Time Paper Speaker
10.50 - 11.00 welcome welcome
11.00 - 12.00 Keynote:Advances and Challenges in Payment Channel Networks Matteo Maffei
12.00 - 12.15 Enabling Private Attributes in SSI Access Control Systems with DLT and zkSNARK Damiano Di Francesco Maesa, Andrea Lisi, Paolo Mori and Laura Ricci
12.15 - 12.30 Clearing Fuzzy Signatures: a Proof of Work Blockchain Protocol for Biometric Identification Paolo Santini, Giulia Rafaiani, Massimo Battaglioni, Marco Baldi and Franco Chiaraluce
12.30 - 14.00 lunch break lunch break
14.00 - 14.15 Incentives Against Timelock Bribes Zeta Avarikioti and Orfeas Stefanos Thyfronitis Litos
14.15 - 14.30 Online Admission Control and Rebalancing in Payment Channel Networks Mahsa Bastankhah, Krishnendu Chatterjee, Mohammad Ali Maddah-Ali, Stefan Schmid, Jakub Svoboda and Michelle Yeo
14.30 - 14.45 Hide & Seek: Privacy-Preserving Rebalancing on Payment Channel Networks Zeta Avarikioti, Krzysztof Pietrzak, Iosif Salem, Stefan Schmid, Samarth Tiwari and Michelle Yeo
14.45 - 15.00 ZeroMT: multi-transfer protocol for enabling privacy in off-chain payments Emanuele Scala, Leonardo Mostarda and Flavio Corradini
15.00 - 15.15 LightPIR: Privacy-Preserving Route Discovery for Payment Channel Networks Krzysztof Pietrzak, Iosif Salem, Stefan Schmid and Michelle Yeo
15.15 - 15.30 Exploring the Benefits of Blockchain Technology for MLOps Pipeline Alessandro Marcelletti and Andrea Morichetta
15.30 - 16.00 coffee break coffee break
16.00 - 16.15 From Weakly-terminating Binary Agreement and Reliable Broadcast to Atomic Broadcast Andreas Fackler, Samuel Schlesinger and Matthew Doty
16.15 - 16.30 The semitopology of heterogeneous consensus Murdoch Gabbay and Giuliano Losa
16.30 - 16.45 A Security Analysis of Avalanche Ignacio Amores Sesar, Christian Cachin and Enrico Tedeschi
16.45 - 17.00 Hyperledger Fabric attacks mitigation Remo Pareschi, Federico Zappone, Francesco Salzano and Pierluigi Di Pilla
17.00 - 17.15 A Critique of Inflationary Validator Rewards and Consensus for Proof-of-Stake Systems Harry Halpin
19.00 - 20.00 Welcome reception Welcome reception

Keynote speaker

Matteo Maffei (TU Wien): Advances and Challenges in Payment Channel Networks

Permissionless cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin enable secure payments in a decentralized, trustless environment. Transactions are verified through a consensus mechanism and all valid transactions are recorded in a public, distributed ledger, often called blockchain. This approach has inherent scalability issues and fails to meet the growing user demands: In Bitcoin, the transaction throughput is technically limited to tens of transactions per second and the transaction confirmation time is around an hour. In contrast, more centralized payment networks such as the Visa credit card network, can handle peaks of more than 40K transactions per second. Payment channels (PC) have emerged as one of the most promising scalability solutions. A PC enables a pair of users to securely perform an arbitrary amount of instantaneous transactions with each other, while burdening the blockchain with merely two transactions, one for opening and one for closing the PC. PCs can be connected to each other, forming a so called payment channel network (PCN), which allows any two users connected by a path of PCs to perform off-chain transactions. The most prominent example, currently deployed in Bitcoin, is the Lightning Network, which hosts bitcoins worth more than 170M USD, in a total of more than 27K nodes and more than 76K channels. While effective, PCNs suffer from several drawbacks, such as security attacks (e.g., wormhole and griefing attacks), privacy vulnerabilities (e.g., linkability attacks), and hard-to-realize system assumptions (e.g., nodes being constantly online), which have opened up an exciting and rapidly growing research field. This keynote will overview the state-of-the-art in payment channel networks, covering the cryptographic, game-theoretic, and networking foundations. We will also highlight the most significant open challenges in the field and the most promising research directions to address them.

Organising committee chairs

Organising committee