Blockchain Law Conference in Canberra 27 February

Professor Sjef van Erp

The Australian National University is hosting a free conference on "Blockchain Technology, Data Management and Smart Contracts", in Canberra, Thursday 27 February 2020.

"Blockchain and smart contracts are technological developments with significant implications for private law transactions in a range of areas. Blockchain or ‘distributed ledger technology’ (DLT) is already being used in the financial services sector and has great potential in a range of areas including land registration systems and global supply chains. These technologies also raise questions concerning data management, data protection, adjudication and dispute settlement."

Speakers

• Professor Sjef van Erp
• Dr Phillipa Ryan
• Matthew Baldwin
• Hannah Glass
• Karen Cohen
• Katrina Donaghy
• Scott Chamberlain
• Samuel Brooks
• Dr Damian Clifford
• Rajiv Cabraal

ANU Seminar on Blockchain Smart Contracts, Canberra, 3 pm, 12 April 2019

Dr. Neville Grech, from University of Athens, will speak on "Gigahorse: Thorough Smart Contract Decompilation and Security Analyses" at the Australian National University in Canberra, Computer Science and IT Building (No 108), room N224, 3pm, 12 April 2019. Free, no RSVP required.

Abstract:

Smart contracts on blockchain platforms (e.g., Ethereum) represent a software domain with critical correctness needs. Smart contract users and security auditors can greatly benefit from a mechanism to recover the original structure of contracts, as evident from past work: many security analyses of smart contracts begin with a decompilation step.

In this talk, we present the Gigahorse framework, which is at the core of the the contract-library.com service. Contract-library.com contains the most complete, high-level decompiled representation of all Ethereum smart contracts, with security analyses applied to these in realtime.

The Gigahorse framework is a decompilation and security analysis framework that natively supports Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bytecode. Its internal intermediate representation of smart contracts makes implicit data- and control-flow dependencies of the EVM bytecode explicit. Using this framework we have developed and adapted several advanced high-level client analyses, including MadMax and Ethainter. All our client analyses benefit from high-level domain-specific concepts (such as "dynamic data structure storage" and "safely resumable loops") and achieve high precision and scalability.

 One such client analysis, MadMax, flags contracts with a current monetary value in the $B range. (Manual inspection of a sample of flagged contracts shows that 81% of the sampled warnings do indeed lead to vulnerabilities.)

Speaker:

I am currently a Reach High fellow at the University of Athens, as well as at the University of Malta. My areas expertise include program analysis, applied to security and other properties. I have also published in the areas of embedded systems, smart contracts (including a distinguished paper award at OOPSLA), semantics and generative programming. My research tools include decompilers and security analyzers for the Ethereum platform (contract-library.com) and Java pointer and taint analysis frameworks (Doop, P/Taint and HeapDL). Previously, I was a Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, and have worked in industry as a Data Scientist and Software Engineer. I hold a PhD from the University of Southampton.

ACS Blockchain Committee

The Australian Computer Society (ACS) has announced the members of their Blockchain Committee for 2017/2018. I am delighted to have been included. The committee is to look into the technical aspects and use of blockchain, including Smart Contracts.

ACS Blockchain Committee

Chair: Dr Vincent Gramoli, Head of the Concurrent Systems Research Group at the University of Sydney.

Vice-Chair: Dr Philippa Ryan, barrister and lecturer, Faculty of Law, University of Technology.

Members:

• Mr Ambarish Natu, IT Architect, Australian Taxation Office 
• Professor Ren Ping Liu, Head of Discipline, Network and Cyber Security, School of Electrical and Data Engineering, University of Technology Sydney. 
• Mr Scott Nelson, member of the National Committee of the IEC in Australia. 
• Mr Steven Pereira, Chief Information Officer, GS1 Australia 
• Mr Tom Worthington, Honorary Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science, Australian National University.