5th Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts
In Association with Financial Cryptography 2021
March 5, 2021
-ONLINE-
Call for Papers
Smart contracts, a highly transformational technology, are self-enforcing agreements in the form of executable programs that are deployed to and run on top of blockchains.
Several proposals have developed the idea of algorithmic validation of decentralised trust, along Szabo's intuition.The first significant example was the Ethereum blockchain. A myriad of possible further directions have been proposed, many of them are in active development.
These technologies introduce a novel programming framework and execution environment, which are not satisfactorily understood at the moment. Multidisciplinary and multifactorial aspects affect correctness, safety, privacy, authentication, efficiency, sustainability, resilience and trust in smart contracts.
Existing frameworks, which are competing for their market share, adopt different solutions to issues like the above ones. Merits of proposed solutions are still to be fully evaluated and compared by means of systematic scientific investigation, and further research is needed towards laying the foundations of Trusted Smart Contracts.
A non-exhaustive list of topics of interest, open problems and future directions includes:
- validation and definition of the programming abstractions and execution models,- verification of the properties expected to be enforced by smart contracts,
- incentives, governance, participatory models, and implications on smart contracts,
- resilience of the consensus/validation/mining/execution model,
- fairness and decentralisation of contracts and their management,
- rewards, economics and sustainability/stability of the framework,
- on- and off-chain interaction modalities, protocols and context,
- (smart-contract supported) multi-chain interoperability
- (smart-contract supported) decentralised exchanges
- sharding, concurrency, and parallelism in smart contracts,
- effects of consensus mechanisms and proof-of mechanisms on smart contracts,
- game-theoretic approaches for security and validation,
- digital and ring signature
- multiparty computation and homomorphic encryption for the privacy of smart contract execution
- privacy and privacy-preserving contracts,
- authentication and anonymity management,
- oblivious transfer,
- data provenance,
- access rights,
- foundations of software engineering for smart contracts,
- blockchain data analysis,
- comparison of the permissioned and non-permissioned scenarios,
- use cases and killer applications of smart contracts,
- regulation and law enforcement,
- future outlook on smart contract technologies.
WTSC focuses on smart contracts as an application layer on top of blockchains, however aspects of the underlying supporting blockchains clearly become relevant in so much as they affect properties of the smart contracts, and are of great interest for WTSC.
WTSC aims to gather together researchers from both academia and industry interested in the many facets of Trusted Smart Contract engineering, and to provide a multi-disciplinary forum for discussing open problems, proposed solutions and the vision on future developments.
Associated to Financial Cryptography, a recognised premiere conference for the blockchain world, WTSC aims to become a reference venue for the discussion of cutting-edge smart contracts and associated blockchain technologies.
Experts in fields including (but not limited to!):
- programming languages,- verification,
- security,
- software engineering,
- decision and game theory,
- cryptography,
- finance and economics,
- monetary systems,
- regulations and law.
as well as, practitioners and companies interested in blockchain technologies, are invited to submit their findings, case studies and reports on open problems for presentation at the workshop, take part in this fourth edition of WTSC and make it a lively forum.
Invited Speaker
|
Darren Tapp
Dash Investment Foundation “Advancements in Consensus Algorithms With Applications to Special Purpose Contracts” Abstract. We briefly review different approaches to smart contract security. We then explore special purpose contracts and discuss how greater security is expected from contracts that have a restricted scope. We provide examples where special purpose contracts may collapse Zooko's triangle. We will also explore other exciting applications. |
Important Dates
WTSC adopts this year a novel submission schedule with double deadline. A first deadline will allow authors to plan their participation well in advance. A second deadline will allow authors who need extra time to develop their contributions, to have a further opportunity to participate. Selected borderline papers from the first deadline will be considered for and also invited to resubmit to the second deadline.
Abstract registration is kindly requested in advance for both deadlines.
| Abstract Registration (recommended) | December 16, 2020 |
| Paper Submission Deadline | December 23, 2020 |
| Early Author Notification | January 20, 2021 |
| Late Abstract Registration | February 1, 2021 |
| Late Submission Deadline |
|
| Late Author Notification | February 21, 2021 |
| WTSC | March 5, 2021 |
| Financial Cryptography | March 1-5, 2021 |
| Final Papers | TBA for the post proceeding Springer volume. |
Submission
WTSC solicits submissions of manuscripts that represent significant and novel research contributions. Submissions must not substantially overlap with works that have been published or that are simultaneously submitted to a journal or a conference with proceedings.
Submissions should follow the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science format and should be no more than 15 pages excluding references and appendices. Papers may also be in a short format, no more than 8 pages excluding references and appendices.
In-progress work and developing ideas can be submitted as a poster.
Also "Systemization of Knowledge" papers will be accepted and have a page limit of 20 pages excluding references and appendices. These should be marked "SoK:".
Accepted papers will appear in the proceedings published by Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Authors who seek to submit their works to journals may opt-out by publishing an extended abstract only.
All submissions will be reviewed double-blind, and as such, must be anonymous, with no author names, affiliations, acknowledgements, or obvious references.
Submission Page
Submission page is now open: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wtsc2021
FC is organized annually by the International Financial Cryptography Association in cooperation with IACR.