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