Keep Network Goes to BPASE 2018

The Keep Team attended one of the few strictly academic blockchain conferences last week — cue “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” intro…

When I found out we were attending BPASE (Blockchain Protocol Analysis and Security Engineering)at Stanford I was extremely excited. For starters, as we are a totally distributed team, it’s always great to come together and jam in-person. Secondly, I hadn’t yet been to an academic conference and BPASE is one of the few in this space solely dedicated to blockchains and cryptography.

Keep also decided to sponsor BPASE. We believe it is important to encourage events focused on education, community, and development. This conference was a great place to learn from industry leaders and connect with people who are as excited about the space as we are. As a team we are always on the lookout for better security practices and more efficient ways of operating our network.

A little background about me as we dive in — I’m Jack Knutson and I am the Community Manager at Keep. I am your first point of contact on Slack and I’m located in St. Paul, MN. I’ve spent the last 10 years studying the economics of currency markets and policy, and have been immersed in cryptocurrencies since 2012.

Flying into the Bay Area feels like coming home, it is a special place. As soon as I made it to the office we hit the ground running. We were getting caught up on some exciting things we’re going to reveal to the Keep Network community in the very near future! It was off to bed quickly afterwards to get ready for the first day of BPASE.

Day 1: Wednesday

BPASE opened with a very informative presentation from Max Fang on selfish mining and other attacks on Bitcoin. It was great to see some variations on the attacks that James Prestwich described for us in his post earlier this year. It was a pleasant way to ease in to the conference with a topic I was familiar with. Directly after we were absolutely floored by Charles Guillemet from Ledger. I am pretty certain that everyone in that room was in shock while he was describing state-of-the-art attacks on secure hardware wallets. Charles, with a calm and direct demeanor, talked of James Bond level attacks, including reverse engineering using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Focused Ion Beams (FIB). Also, machine learning helps us to understand the patterns in electromagnetic behavior of private keys. Our Tech Lead Antonio simply summed up his thoughts while reminiscing later in the evening,

“It’s amazing how fragile security is.”

Karl Floresch brought all of his enthusiasm and energy (and some great slides) for a wonderful presentation on Casper. He gave us a little hint, though not intentionally, as what we might expect as a staking minimum when Casper is implemented. Matt immediately turned to me when he heard Karl say those numbers: “did he just tell us the minimum!?”

Olaoluwa Osuntokun gave a very informative presentation on the Lightning Network. He is probably the best ambassador for Lightning because he speaks at lightning-like speeds. I will have to go back and listen to this at half speed as it was so jammed packed with information I could hardly keep up.

Day 2: Thursday

After the first day, we had incredibly high expectations for this conference and day two had a great lineup. I really enjoyed Pieter Wuille’s talk on Schnorr signatures. Schnorr signatures can help Bitcoin with scalability allowing multiple parties to send a transaction with just one signature. This also has the added benefit of privacy by making your signatures look like everyone else’s. The things that makes Bitcoin great, its decentralization and need for a general consensus from the stakeholders, are also a hindrance to the technological development. Last year we got SegWit, this year is Lightning Network and hopefully next up is Schnorr signatures. (Please!?)

Russell O’Connor went over Simplicity, a new language for blockchains. The language is so simple that it can fit on a t-shirt! I am all for more simple programming languages. After talking with some of our team and also working on learning Solidity myself, it’s clear that there is a need for code that is easier to write and verify. There have been numerous occasions where even the brightest people writing code make a small mistake that ends up costing users millions. For example Parity’s multi-signature hack last November where a user “accidentally” killed the contract. I am looking forward to seeing Simplicity and other user-friendly languages used in blockchains in the future.

Day 3: Friday

The last day of presentations were a major draw for us to come to BPASE. We are a huge fan of Dfinity, and we are using some of their work as a basis to create our own random beacon and threshold relay for Ethereum. Dfinity released their whitepaper on their Consensus System just two days before BPASE. This was an excellent opportunity to hear Timo Hanke discuss it in person.

Benedikt Bünz presented on Bulletproofs. Bulletproofs are short non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs that require no trusted setup. It allows for efficient confidential transactions. Bulletproofs can use a custom MPC (Multi Party Computation) to create proofs, rather than have parties create individual proofs they can use a few rounds to create one proof without revealing what their secret values are to each other. Not only does this make transactions more private it also can make them more efficient. Naturally, bulletproofs have caught the eye of myself and the team. I have been very interested in bulletproofs so it was great to see some progress being made on the research and efficiency of them.

What’s Next

There were so many good presentations that my brain was numb afterwards. If I could, I would write about almost every single presentation. However, I don’t need to: Stanford put the videos and slides up on the website so you can check them out for yourself.

Conferences like BPASE are worthwhile to attend because you get to see the work and progress being done on systems and techniques in-person. So much of what I read and interact with is online, BPASE and other conferences are great way to be fully present and enveloped into the community.

A special thank you to a few of our Slack members who came and introduced themselves. Also, to our advisor James Prestwich for keeping me entertained and engaged during the breaks with his amazingly creative ideas for atomic swaps and stable coins.

Learn More

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