Invited Talk

Speaker: Prof Dipanwita Roy Chowdhury, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur

Talk Title: Can Cellular Automata Derive a Resource Efficient Blockchain?

Abstract: Blockchain is a distributed ledger or database that is maintained by a large number of nodes over a computer network. The parties, traditionally termed as miners, need to solve an instance of some fixed computational problem in order to write their transactions in the Blockchain. This computational problem is called proof-of-work (PoW). Resource-Efficient blockchain uses trusted hardware that guarantees security similar to PoW, but with a small computational overhead. Recently, cellular automata (CA), has been proposed to be the basis of a new PoW in order to reduce the power requirement while maintaining 128-bit security. CA with its uniform regular structure and with inherent cryptographic properties achieve both the security as well as hardware efficiency. In this talk, I shall be introducing Cellular Automata as a primitive for resource-efficient PoW but still have comparable security.

Bio: Dr. Dipanwita Roy Chowdhury is a professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India. Her current research interests are in the field of Design and Analysis of Cryptographic Algorithms, VLSI Design and Secured Embedded Systems, Error Correcting Codes and Cellular Automata. She received her B.Tech and M.Tech degrees in Computer Science from University of Kolkata in 1987 and 1989 respectively, and the PhD degree from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 1994. She has published more than 160 technical papers in International Journals and Conferences. Dr. Roy Chowdhury is the recipient of INSA Young Scientist Award, Abdul Kalam Technology Innovation National Fellowship, Associate of Indian Academy of Science and is the fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineers.