1st International Workshop on Blockchain Security, Performance and Applications (BlockSPAN)

Blockchain is one of the disruptive technologies of the current era, which enables trustworthy transaction processing through participation of distributed nodes. The widespread adoption of blockchain has been facilitated by research on blockchain beyond cryptocurrencies where significant efforts have been made to devise different business models, its applicability in various domains and to optimize its adaptability for different applications. Being the most notable blockchain-based application, the success of Bitcoin has introduced an innovative model of decentralised, trustworthy application development across diverse domains such as healthcare, e-voting logistics, and finance. structure among transactions as well as public availability of distributed ledger of transaction-records in a peer-to-peer network.

The increasing use of blockchain within diverse domains has also identified several challenges which have to be addressed for its widespread adoption. Among these, security and scalability are the most prominent challenges which require further research efforts to address them. For instance, attack vectors such as encryption scheme used in the transactions, methods for verifying transactions and the design of the transaction have been identified as sources of threats for blockchain-based applications. Furthermore, with growing applications and users for blockchain-based applications, scalability is a critical challenge and as such has been translated into parameters such as transactions per second, block generation rate, and block size.

We invite submissions from researchers and practitioners from government, industry, and academia in the following and related areas:

- Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies

- Proof-of-work and consensus algorithms for blockchains

- Decentralization, scalability, and security trade-off

- Simulation and performance evaluation techniques

- Secure smart contract and chain code

- Trust and reputation within blockchain-based systems

- Blockchain-based solutions to aid cutting-edge in AI and machine learning

- Analysis and evaluation of security, scalability, and other performance metrics of blockchains

- Authentication and authorization solutions within blockchains

- Blockchain-based solutions for emerging domains such as 5G, edge computing, and SDNs

- Applications of blockchains within e-government, logistics, healthcare, SmartX systems and other areas

Authors of Selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version of their work to:

- ACM's journal on Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice

- MDPI Electronics, Special Issue on the "Security and Privacy in Blockchain and IoT"

Important dates:

Due date for submissions: October 31, 2021 December 05, 2021

Notification of decision to authors: November 15, 2021 December 17, 2021

Camera-ready of accepted papers: November 30, 2021 January 05, 2022

Workshop: January 17, 2022

BlockSPAN2021 is being held in conjunction with the ICFNDS2021 and proceedings will be published alongside conference proceedings. ACM ICPS are published in the ACM Digital Library and indexed in DBLP, Scopus and Thomson Reuters. The ISBN number assigned to ICFNDS 2021 is 978-1-4503-8734-7