Risk & Security with Blockchain & DLTs

At the heart of developing blockchain is cryptography, mathematics, and core computer science and engineering skills. However, the exposure and risks of implementing blockchain solutions might be farther reaching than purely what is happening at a coding or hardware issue. These systems all variably operate under a dependence on hardware speeds and reliability, good architecture, robust digital infrastructure and depending on the use case, in some applications, potentially unregulated offline interactions. What is the risk of a poorly understood or implemented smart-contracts having unintended consequences? Can we rely on these systems to work as intended and what risk do unsupervised systems have when immutable ledgers are involved? With the potential for blockchain and smart contracts to underpin the basic functions of our societies, what measures should be put in place to ensure the good coding practises and defences are there to avoid unintended consequences and protect the valuable data that is to be stored within? This session also looks at what are the unthinkable ways that these systems can be manipulated or compromised and what is being done to avoid this?

Lead Participants

Vallipuram Muthu, Associate Professor, Griffith University
Liming Zhu, Data61
Frank Ricotta, Founder BurstIQ
Daniel Floreani, CyberOps
Shada Alsalamah, College of Computer and Information Science, King Saud University

Moderated by

Jason Lee, NEM.io Foundation