HyperService: Interoperability and Programmability across Heterogeneous Blockchains

Date/Time
Date(s) - 12/06/2019
5:30 pm - 8:00 pm

Location
CSU - Fenn Hall - Room 103 (Compton Lounge)

Categories No Categories

Agenda:

5:30 – 6:00: Registration, Refreshments, Food and Networking

6:00 – 7:00: Presentation

7:000 – 8:00: Q&A and Networking

Abstract:

Blockchain interoperability, which allows state transitions across different blockchain networks, is critical functionality to facilitate major blockchain adoption. Existing interoperability protocols mostly focus on atomic token exchanges between blockchains. However, as blockchains have been upgraded from passive distributed ledgers into programmable state machines (thanks to smart con-tracts), the scope of blockchain interoperability goes beyond just token exchanges. In this talk, Xusheng Xiao will present HyperService, the first platform that delivers interoperability and programmability across heterogeneous blockchains. HyperService is powered by two innovative designs: (i) a developer-facing programming framework that allows developers to build cross-chain applications in a unified programming model; and (ii) a secure blockchain-facing cryptography protocol that provably realizes those applications on blockchains. We implement a prototype of HyperService in approximately 35,000 lines of code to demonstrate its practicality. Our experiments show that (i) HyperService imposes reasonable latency, in order of seconds, on the end-to-end execution of cross-chain applications; (ii) the HyperService platform is scalable to continuously incorporate new large-scale production blockchains.

Biography:

Xusheng Xiao is an assistant professor of Computer and Data Sciences at Case Western Reserve University. He received his Ph. D. degree in Computer Science at North Carolina State University in 2014. He was a visiting student in Computer Science department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2013-2014. His research interests are in software engineering and computer security, with the focus on making software applications and computer systems more reliable and secure via program analysis, software testing, text analysis, and system monitoring. His research has been presented at top-tier computer science venues such as ICSE, FSE, ISSTA, ASE, USENIX Security, CCS, and VLDB. His group recently developed one of the first interoperability blockchain platform with programmability and strong security guarantees, and some companies such as Harmony (https://harmony.one/) has shown interests in using his protocol for cross-chain communications. His work in attack investigation for Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks was selected as one of the top ten finalists for CSAW Best Applied Security Paper Award 2018. His work in mobile security was selected as one of the top ten finalists for CSAW Best Applied Security Paper Award 2015, and produced a static analysis tool that was deployed in TouchDevelop of Microsoft Research. His research is supported by NSF and Samsung. More details of his research can be found at his homepage, http://engineering.case.edu/groups/xusheng-xiao/.

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