Monday, September 23rd at 11:00, Christof Torres (who recently joined the BIG ERA Chair team) presents a research talk at INESC-ID organized by the Distributed, Parallel and Secure Systems (DPSS) group at INESC-ID. The talk will be available via zoom, with no previous registration required.

Building Secure Decentralized Financial Systems”. 

Abstract 

Blockchains have experienced a surge in popularity, with decentralized financial systems, known as decentralized finance (DeFi), playing a pivotal role in this growth. Smart contracts serve as the backbone of these DeFi systems, being programs deployed and executed on the blockchain. However, akin to traditional programs, smart contracts are susceptible to programming errors and malicious attacks. In recent years, numerous smart contracts have fallen victim to exploitation, resulting in the theft of assets worth millions of dollars. This talk starts by offering a concise overview of relevant areas of research that are centered around the security and privacy of smart contracts. Afterwards, an overview is provided on the current stat-of-the-art techniques that are being employed to detect traditional vulnerabilities in smart contract. Finally, the talk touches upon the emerging trend of economic security, which relates to vulnerabilities which have an economical impact such as frontrunning and price oracle manipulation. The talk then concludes by shedding light on the challenges faced by current stat-of-the-art techniques when identifying issues related to economic attacks and highlights potential directions towards solving these challenges related to the growing composability of smart contracts and the difficulty in extracting economical semantics from code.

Bio

Christof Ferreira Torres is currently an invited assistant professor at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon and a researcher in the BIG ERA Chair project. Prior to his current position, he was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, where he was part of the Secure & Trustworthy Systems Group lead by Prof. Dr. Shweta Shinde. His research focuses on analyzing the security and privacy of distributed ledgers. He obtained a joint Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Luxembourg and the Technical University of Munich. His Ph.D. thesis focuses on the automated security assessment of smart contracts. He received the Excellent Doctoral Thesis award from the University of Luxembourg and Ripple’s Impact award for his research on the security of smart contracts. Prior to his Ph.D., he has been working as a security researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security (AISEC) near Munich, Germany.