The BCon (Blockchain Consensus and Beyond: Scalable Secure Consensus & Applications) project seeks to design new methods for achieving consensus in a distributed system in a secure and scalable manner by combining blockchain technologies and traditional consensus techniques based on state machine replication strengthened using hardware security features.

The BCon project is funded by the Academy of Finland (grant 309195) for three years, 2017-2020.

Quick Links:

• Project Summary
• Dissemination of Research Results
• Remote Attestation & Deniability
• SACZyzzyva

News:

• November 19: The IEEE Computer Society Publications Board has awarded the 2019 Best Paper Award to Secure Systems Group alumni Jian Liu’s “Scalable Byzantine Consensus via Hardware-Assisted Secret Sharing” paper published on IEEE Transactions on Computers. The paper presents FastBFT, a fast consensus algorithm that can be used by blockchains. Congratulations to Jian Liu and Asokan!
• October 2019: Our paper Making Speculative BFT Resilient with Trusted Monotonic Counters presented at the
• 38th International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS 2019).
• July 2019: Our “Circumventing Cryptographic Deniability with Remote Attestation” paper presented at the 19th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2019) in Stockholm, Sweden.
• July 2019: Remote attestation and deniability: challenges and opportunities presented at the OTRv4 Summit in Stockholm, Sweden.
• June 2019: Our paper Making Speculative BFT Resilient with Trusted Monotonic Counters has been accepted by the 38th International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS 2019).
• February 2019: Our paper Circumventing Cryptographic Deniability with Remote Attestation has been accepted by the 2019 Privacy Enhancing Technology Symposium.
• December 2018: The Undeniable Truth: How Remote Attestation Circumvents Deniability Guarantees in Secure Messaging Protocols presented at Black Hat Europe (video).
• September 2018: Lachlan Gunn made a five-day research visit to Intel Labs in Hillsboro, Oregon.
• September 2018: Can Blockchains Be Made Better Using Hardware-assisted Security? presented at the symposium Can The World Run on Blockchains? The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly organized by TU Darmstadt’s Center for Secure Distributed Ledgers and Contracts.
• September 2017: The BCon project starts in the beginning of September!