Blockchain Technology - Overview, Security Aspects, and a Practical Use-case

Summary:

Blockchain technology holds immense promise for a variety of industries, including financial services, real estate, supply chain management, healthcare, academia, and more. To make sense of this revolution, you need to understand what a blockchain is and what it is capable of doing. This talk is divided into three parts. The first part covers the basic overview of Blockchain technology, specifically, it includes Blockchain’s working principle, benefits, potential application areas, and limitations. Blockchain is the technology backbone of Bitcoin, therefore, I will present the working methodology of the Bitcoin system and its core components such as transaction structure, consensus algorithm, and distributed ledger. In the second part of the talk, the major security attacks on blockchain systems will be presented along with a discussion on their possible countermeasures. Finally, the third part of the talk will discuss a practical use-case (i.e., secure and accountable medical data sharing) where the use of Blockchain technology along with Smart contracts could provide security, privacy, and trust-related benefits.

Brief profile:

Chhagan Lal received the Ph.D. degree in computer science and engineering from the Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur, India, in 2014. During his Ph.D., he has been awarded with the Canadian Commonwealth Scholarship under the Canadian Commonwealth Scholarship Program to work in University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada. He is currently working as a Senior Researcher at Department of Intelligent Systems, Cybersecurity Group, TU Delft, Netherlands. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Simula Research Laboratory, Oslo, Norway, and with the Department of Mathematics, University of Padua, Italy, where he was part of the SPRITZ Research Group. His current research areas include applications of blockchain technologies, security in software-defined networking, and Internet of Things networks.