4th Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts
In Association with Financial Cryptography 2020
February 14, 2020
Shangri-La Tanjung Aru Resort & Spa
Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia
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 Speakers
TBA
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 (preferably) | December 9, 2019 |
| Paper Submission Deadline | December 12, 2019 |
| Early Author Notification | January 4, 2020 |
| Late Abstract Registration | January 5, 2020 |
| Late Submission Deadline | January 7, 2020 |
| Late Author Notification | January 20, 2020 |
| WTSC | February 14, 2020 |
| Financial Cryptography | February 10 - 14, 2020 |
| 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 including references and appendices. Papers may also be in a short format, no more than 8 pages including 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 15 pages but *excluding* references. 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=wtsc20
Program Chairs
| Andrea Bracciali | University of Stirling, UK |
| Massimiliano Sala | University of Trento, IT |
Program Committee
| Monika di Angelo | Vienna University of Technology, AT |
| Igor Artamonov | Ethereum Classic Dev, UK |
| Daniel Augot | INRIA, FR |
| Surya Bakshi | University of Illinois, USA |
| Fadi Barbara | University of Turin, IT |
| Massimo Bartoletti | University of Cagliari, IT |
| Devraj Basu | Strathclyde University, UK |
| Stefano Bistarelli | University of Perugia, IT |
| Christina Boura | Versailles SQT Univ., FR |
| Andrea Bracciali | University of Stirling, UK |
| Daniel Broby | Strathclyde University, UK |
| James Chapman | IOHK, UK |
| Martin Chapman | King’s College London, UK |
| Alexander Denzler | Lucerne University, CH |
| Nicola Dimitri | University of Siena, IT |
| Nadia Fabrizio | Cefriel, IT |
| Murdoch Gabbay | Heriot-Watt University, UK |
| Oliver Giudice | Banca d'Italia, IT |
| Davide Grossi | University of Groningen, NL |
| Yoichi Hirai | brainbot technologies AG, DE |
| Lars R. Knudsen | Technical University of Denmark, DK |
| Ioannis Kounelis | Joint Research Centre, European Commission, IT |
| Pascal Lafourcade | University Clermont Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, FR |
| Andrew Lewis-Pye | London School of Economics, UK |
| Carsten Maple | Warwick University, UK |
| Michele Marchesi | University of Cagliari, IT |
| Fabio Martinelli | IIT-CNR, IT |
| Luca Mazzola | Lucerne University, CH |
| Sihem Mesnager | University of Paris VIII, FR |
| Philippe Meyer | Avaloq, CH |
| Bud Mishra | NYU, USA |
| Carlos Molina-Jimenez | University of Cambridge, UK |
| Massimo Morini | Banca IMI, IT |
| Immaculate Motsi-Omoijiade | University of Warwick, UK |
| Alex Norta | Tallin University of Technology, EE |
| Akira Otsuka | Institute of Information Security, JP |
| Federico Pintore | University of Oxford, UK |
| Massimiliano Sala | University of Trento, IT |
| Jason Teutsch | Truebit, USA |
| Roberto Tonelli | University of Cagliari, IT |
| Luca Vigano' | University of Verona, IT |
| Philip Wadler | University of Edinburgh, UK |
| Yilei Wang | Qufu Normal University, CN |
| Tim Weingärtner | Lucerne University, CH |
| Ales Zamuda | University of Maribor, SLO |
| Santiago Zanella-Beguelin | Microsoft, UK |
| Dionysis Zindros | University of Athens, GR |
FC is organized annually by the International Financial Cryptography Association in cooperation with IACR.