Blockchain and Decentralized Security (10323)

***ACHTUNG: Kurs wird ausschließlich auf Englisch mit Englischer Prüfung angeboten! // Prüfung muss separat gebucht werden.***

Course Content:

The main objective of the course is to provide a comprehensive overview of the security and privacy of decentralized technologies.

Course participants will be also introduced to the basic security and privacy provisions of existing popular blockchains, and will be exposed to the state-of-the-art attacks and threats reported against existing systems/deployments. The participants will also reason on the effectiveness of combining network-level security primitives, with novel cryptographic primitives to deter attacks on payment systems and on the security of federated learning and distributed learning.

Upon completion of this course, students are expected to be able to:

1. Reason about the security and privacy definitions of decentralized systems.
2. Explain the security of blockchains in light of the state-of-the-art reported attacks.
3. Reason about possible network security and cryptographic countermeasures to deter attacks on decentralized platforms (blockchains and distributed platforms).

Explain best security/privacy practices to strengthen the security of existing blockchains and existing distributed learning platforms, and extract relevant lessons for the design of next-generation decentralized technologies.