For the second year in a row, a flagship cryptography conference in Europe has devoted an entire session to blockchain technology.
It was a sign that cryptographers, who once struggled to take the cryptocurrency space seriously due to its hacks, frauds and often reckless approach to developing secure protocols, are now investing their time into the space.
The 37th annual Eurocrypt[1] conference was held this year on April 30 to May 3, 2018, in Tel Aviv, Israel, at the Dan Panorama Hotel, steps from the Mediterranean ocean. Hosted by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), the conference was attended by 370 people. Five blockchain papers were presented on the second day of the conference, and one of those even received a “best paper” award.
On the third day of the conference, Matthew Green, a cryptographer and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, had the honor of presenting an invited talk on the 30-year history of cryptocurrencies.
The Papers
Getting a paper accepted at Eurocrypt is no mean feat. Only one in five papers that are submitted get accepted after going through a months-long, peer-review process, where experts in the field scrutinize the work to determine its suitability for the conference.
Four blockchain papers were presented at this year’s blockchain session. Cornell Tech’s Rafael Pass presented Thunderella[2], a blockchain protocol focused on fast transactions. Following that, Vassilis Zikas, a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and IOHK research fellow, looked at the core cryptographic assumptions underlying Bitcoin[3].
Shedding light on why the second paper was important, because Bitcoin did not come through traditional academic channels, cryptographers had no formal model of how the protocol worked, which they needed to build alternative consensus algorithms with comparable
