The interest in Blockchain is evident from the growing number of conferences and workshops dedicated to the topic as well as journal special issues including industrial applications (i.e., increased interest in the use of Blockchains across many applications and significant investment by different industries in their development). This workshop will serve as a forum for sharing experiences and findings relating to protocol design, real test-beds, experimental evaluation, prototyping and empirical characterization of security, privacy issues in DLT in Distributed Computing and Blockchain. This workshop also focuses on techniques, experiences and lessons learned with respect to the state-of-art security and privacy solutions for DLT and Blockchain along with some open challenges. The workshop welcomes regular papers and poster proposals for demonstrations of novel work / work-in-progress in network security, trust, privacy in blockchain systems. It is also encouraged to submit research works related to development of testbeds, measurement platforms, and innovative prototypes.
Suggested contribution topics include (but are not limited to) empirical and theoretical studies of:
Anonymity and privacy issues in blockchains
Using blockchain in digital forensics and cyber-threat hunting, cyber-threat intelligence and cyber-threat analytics
Atomic swapping (also known as atomic cross-chain trading)
Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, ZCash protocol, other cryptocurrency and extensions (cryptography, scripting/smart contract language, etc.)
Blockchain based open-source tools
Blockchain for securing cyber infrastructure and IoT networks
Blockchain-based authentication, authorization and accounting mechanisms
Consensus protocols for blockchains
Decentralized applications (exchanges, mining pools, trading platforms, etc.)
Forensics readiness of blockchain technologies
Formal verification of blockchain protocols and smart contracts
Fraud detection and financial crime prevention
Incentive mechanisms for blockchains
Interfacing fiat and cryptocurrencies
Legal, ethical and societal aspects of (decentralized) cryptocurrency
Off-chain payment channels
Permissioned (e.g. Hyperledger) and permissionless (e.g. Bitcoin) blockchains
Privacy and anonymity-enhancing technologies
Scalability and scalable services for blockchain systems
Scalability issues and solutions for blockchain
Security of blockchains
Sidechain technologies
Simple payment verification modes and lightweight blockchain clients
Smart contract programming languages
Transaction graph analysis
Usability and user studies
Vulnerabilities of smart contracts
Security issues in Distributed IoT
Blockchains in NFV-SDN