Blockchain Security & Scalability
Although blockchain technology has the potential to transform every industry, the performance level of existing blockchain platforms is too low to realize that vision. From an architectural viewpoint, this unsolved problem is a bottleneck to blockchain adoption in many applications. Our work aims to improve the scalability of blockchain to achieve Visa-like transaction speed. Additionally, we explore and defend against possible security threats and vulnerabilities that could be exploited to obstruct blockchain systems, thereby advancing the practicality of blockchain technology.
Objectives:
- Improve the scalability of blockchain systems on a wide variety of applications
- Identify vulnerabilities of blockchain systems, including vulnerabilities arising from the underlying distributed infrastructure.
- Identify & mitigate attacks on the efficiency of blockchain systems.
Publications:
- Muhammad Saad, Victor Cook, Lan N. Nguyen, My T. Thai, and Aziz Mohaisen. “Exploring Spatial, Temporal, and Logical Attacks on Bitcoin Network,” in NDSS 2019 (Poster), 2019
- Muhammad Saad, Victor Cook, Lan N. Nguyen, My T. Thai, and Aziz Mohaisen. “Partitioning Attacks on Bitcoin Network: Colliding Space, Time and Logic,” in IEEE ICDCS, 2019
- Lan N. Nguyen & Truc Nguyen, Thang N. Dinh, and My T. Thai. “Optimal Transactions Placement for Scalable Blockchain Sharding,” in IEEE ICDCS, 2019
- Truc Nguyen and My T. Thai. “Denial-of-Service Vulnerability of Hash-based Transaction Sharding: Attack and Countermeasure,” in IEEE Transactions on Computers, 2023
Blockchain Applications
Blockchain technology promises a new decentralized platform for various applications such that the possibility of censorship, monopoly, and single point of failures can be eliminated. By design, blockchains are shared, immutable ledgers that are managed by nodes in a peer-to-peer overlay network where they operate efficiently in a decentralized fashion without the need of a central authority. Specifically, it enables a trustless network where participants of the system can settle transactions without having to trust each other. With the aid of the smart contracts technology, blockchain can stimulate the development of a wide range of decentralized applications that go beyond financial transactions. As part of our work on this subject, we study the application of blockchains and smart contracts in a variety of domains.
Objectives:
- Leverage blockchain to tackle security and privacy issues in various domains.
- Develop efficient blockchain-based solutions to manage digital transactions in financial, IoT, and healthcare domains.
Selected Publications:
- Truc Nguyen and My T. Thai. “zVote: A Blockchain-based Privacy-preserving Platform for Remote E-voting,” in IEEE ICC, 2022.
- Truc Nguyen & Phuc Thai, Tre’ R. Jeter, Thang N. Dinh, and My T. Thai. “Blockchain-based Secure Client Selection in Federated Learning”, in IEEE ICBC, 2022.
- Truc Nguyen and My T. Thai. “A Blockchain-based Iterative Double Auction Protocol using Multiparty State Channels,” in ACM TOIT, 2021