Clay Shields - Georgetown University

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Topics and Readings

Date	Topic	Readings
9/6/17	Class Intro	Why Information Security is Hard: An Economic Perspective
9/13/17	Security overview, Bitcoin	Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System(M)
9/20/17	Bitcoin and Blockchains	Bitter to Better : How to Make Bitcoin a Better Currency(K) BLOCKBENCH: A Framework for Analyzing Private Blockchains(M) On the Security and Performance of Proof of Work Blockchains(R)
9/27/17	Bitcoin and Blockchains	On the Instability of Bitcoin Without the Block Reward (K) REM: Resource-Efficient Mining for Blockchains (M) SmartPool: Practical Decentralized Pooled Mining (R)
10/4/17	Bitcoin and Blockchains	Hijacking Bitcoin: Routing Attacks on Cryptocurrencies (K) Etherium: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform (R)
10/11/17	Smart Contracts	The Ether Thief (for background only) Analysis of the DAO exploit(technical description) Enhancing Bitcoin Security and Performance with Strong Consistency via Collective Signing (M) A Concurrent Perspective on Smart Contracts (K) Adding Concurrency to Smart Contracts (R)
10/18/17	Smart Contracts	In Code We Trust? Measuring the Control Flow Immutability of All Smart Contracts Deployed on Ethereum The Ring of Gyges: Investigating the Future of Criminal Smart Contracts Dissecting Ponzi schemes on Ethereum: identification, analysis, and impact
10/25/17	Smart Contracts	Making Smart Contracts Smarter Demystifying Incentives in the Consensus Computer The Miner's Dilemma
11/1/17	Blockchain Alternatives	Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin Catena:Efficient Non-equivocation via Bitcoin Permacoin: Repurposing Bitcoin Work for Data Preservation
11/8/17	Blockchain	Bobtail: A Proof-of-Work Target that Minimizes Blockchain Mining Variance A Secure, Efficient, and Transparent Network Architecture for Bitcoin Breaking and Fixing Gridcoin
11/15/17	Assorted	Invertible Bloom Lookup Tables(K) Dancing on the Lip of the Volcano: Chosen Ciphertext Attacks on Apple iMessage(M) Understanding the Mirai Botnet(R)
11/29/17	Proof of Stake Systems/Neural Networks	PPCoin: Peer-to-Peer Crypto-Currency with Proof-of-Stake Algorand: Scaling Byzantine Agreements for Cryptocurrencies Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks
12/6/17	Blockchain stuff	Ouroboros A Provably Secure Proof-of-Stake Blockchain Protocol On Bitcoin and Red Balloons Be Selfish and Avoid Dilemmas