The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Blockchains
Details
Bio:
Stefan Edwards is the Practice Lead for Commercial Services at Trail of Bits. Stefan is a practice lead at Trail of Bits, and works with clients at the intersection of formal methods and information security thuggery. His foci at ToB are information security leadership, programming language theory, policy wonkery, and long-winded whimsy.
Abstract:
Blockchain is much derided for the problems it causes, and its often complete lack of understanding of what those problems may even be. In this talk, we will focus on what blockchain gets right, and where it still needs to grow. We will begin with a quick overview of formal methods, and then discuss the good (symbolic execution, formal proving, static analysis, &c.), the bad (TOCTOU, gas attacks, permissions issues, &c), and the ugly (policy, efficiency, offchain components, &c)
of blockchains.