Abstract

One of the founding ideas of cryptocurrency is to trust no one and verify everything. This can be done when a user is on a desktop computer: There are enough internet bandwidth and computational resources to download the entire ledger (~500GB) and double-check every fine details (~10W); these computers are called the "full nodes". However, users using "light clients" like cellphones cannot do that. Instead, cellphones trust full nodes and only download a portion of the ledger. This gives malicious full nodes a chance to hide bad transactions and steal money. To overcome this vulnerability, "coded Merkle tree" is proposed. Protecting the Merkle tree with error-correcting codes makes it harder to hide and allows more users to access the cryptocurrency. In this talk, we discuss the properties that the error-correcting codes need in order to prevent this availability attack.

Bio.

Hsin-Po Wang is an Assistant Professor in EE and GICE at National Taiwan University. His research interests lie in information theory and coding theory, where he applies techniques in algebra, combinatorics, and probability theory to polar codes, group testing, distributed storage, and distributed computation. Hsin-Po earned his B.Sc. in Mathematics at National Taiwan University, graduating with high distinction, and completed his Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He has held research positions at UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, and the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. Known for his extensive, creative use of Tikz figures in papers, Hsin-Po is equally passionate about speedrun techniques for educational purposes and assembling binder clips into fullerene-like structures.

 

All faculty and students are welcome to join.