ABSTRACT: This talk presents the Nimble blockchain by Oasis Labs, a system capable of efficiently and securely executing smart contracts. Nimble can run contracts based on different language-specific runtimes, using Web Assembly (WASM). For example, the Ekiden contracts in Nimble can compute in private within Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), i.e., unlike other smart contract systems, their internal state can be confidential. This talk will focus on Nimble’s discrepancy detection, which relies on fewer nodes than traditional BFT systems for strong security guarantees and horizontal scaling that provides parallelism while preserving ACID properties in transaction processing with more flexibility than side chains. We will also discuss how Nimble uses incentives (node operators earn tokens by participating in the system, and lose tokens when nodes misbehave) to provide BAR-fault tolerance.

BIO : Prof. Eunjin (EJ) Jung is an associate professor in Computer Science at University San Francisco and also a software architect at Oasis Labs. She works on designing and building secure distributed systems. She has expertise in BAR-fault tolerance, Byzantin-fault tolerance, cryptography, data provenance, malicious JavaScript detection, database security, policy compatibility in cloud computing, and usable security.

Hosted by Professor John Cho