CS 854: Consensus Protocols and Blockchains

Information

Instructor: Bernard Wong
Email: bernard@uwaterloo.ca
Time: Every Friday at 1:00-3:50 Spring 2023
Location: DC 2568
URL : http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~bernard/courses/cs854-S23

Description

CS854 is a graduate course on current topics in consensus protocols and blockchains. It is offered as a "paper-chase" course: we read and discuss important papers on different subtopics each week. Students must also complete a final project that explores a new idea in one of the sub-topics covered in the course. The goal is that by the end of the course, the final project can serve as a starting point for a workshop paper submission.

Grading

The following is the tentative course grades breakdown.

Paper Reviews

Before each class, each student must submit a review for two of the papers to be discussed that day. A review should include a paragraph summarizing the core contributions of the paper, and a second paragraph that identifies weaknesses in the paper and areas in which the paper can be expanded upon.

Please inform me via email the circumstances for each late or missed submission.

Paper Presentations

Each student is expected to present one or more papers to be discussed in class for at least one class. The paper presentations should follow the same format as a conference talk. The presenter should be prepared with sufficient background knowledge of the related works in the area to answer broad questions and lead the class discussion.

Presenters: Please send me a copy of your slides at least two days before your presentation. I will provide feedback on the slides the next day. Do not just re-use slides provided by the paper authors. You may borrow, with attribution, figures and animations, but your slides should be created independently.

Reading

Date Topic
5/12 Introduction: General course description. Blockchains overview.

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

Ethereum Whitepaper

5/19 Classic Consensus Protocols

The Part-Time Parliament

The Byzantine Generals Problem

Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance

HotStuff: BFT Consensus with Linearity and Responsiveness

5/26 Consensus for Blockchains

SoK: Consensus in the Age of Blockchains (Vikram S)

Algorand: Scaling Byzantine Agreements for Cryptocurrencies (Ali G)

Scalable and Probabilistic Leaderless BFT Consensus through Metastability (Shirley C)

Monoxide: Scale Out Blockchain with Asynchronous Consensus Zones (Jiada L)

(Optional) Proof of Stake FAQ

6/2 Smart Contracts

Making Smart Contracts Smarter

Smart Contract Development: Challenges and Opportunities (Vikram S)

Smart Contract Vulnerabilities: Vulnerable Does Not Imply Exploited (Hans B)

Proxy Hunting: Understanding and Characterizing Proxy-based Upgradeable Smart Contracts in Blockchains (Aryan H.)

(Optional) Introduction to Smart Contracts

6/9 DeFi and Oracles

SoK: Decentralized Finance (DeFi) (Ali G)

Uniswap v2 Core (Mohammadamin S)

AAVE Protocol Whitepaper (Winston Y)

SoK: Oracles from the Ground Truth to Market Manipulation (Sky Q Moved to July 7)

6/16 Scalability

Arbitrum: Scalable, private smart contracts (Jiada L)

Bitcoin-NG: A Scalable Blockchain Protocol (Shirley C)

SoK: Sharding on Blockchain (Sky Q)

Teechain: a secure payment network with asynchronous blockchain access (Shaquille H Moved to July 7)

(Optional) Zero-Knowledge Rollups

6/23 Attacks

Frontrunner Jones and the Raiders of the Dark Forest: An Empirical Study of Frontrunning on the Ethereum Blockchain

SoK: Preventing Transaction Reordering Manipulations in Decentralized Finance (Mohammadamin S)

SoK: Not Quite Water Under the Bridge: Review of Cross-Chain Bridge Hacks (Sky Q)

The Blockchain Imitation Game (Aryan H)

6/30 Cross-Chain

The Interblockchain Communication Protocol: An Overview

Polkadot: Vision for a Heterogeneous Multi-Chain Framework

ETH-NEAR Rainbow Bridge

Atomic Cross-Chain Swaps (Winston Y)

7/7 Trusted Execution Environments

FASTKITTEN: Practical Smart Contracts on Bitcoin

Ekiden: A Platform for Confidentiality-Preserving, Trustworthy, and Performant Smart Contracts (Pulkit S)

BITE: Bitcoin Lightweight Client Privacy using Trusted Execution

REM: Resource-Efficient Mining for Blockchains

7/14 Economics

Transaction Fee Mechanism Design for the Ethereum Blockchain: An Economic Analysis of EIP-1559 (Pulkit S)

Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable (Ali G)

An Eye for an Eye: Economics of Retaliation in Mining Pools (Shirley C)

SoK: A Classification Framework for Stablecoin Designs

7/21 Others

SoK: Blockchain Governance

The Anatomy of a Cryptocurrency Pump-and-Dump Scheme (Shaquille H)

Erays: Reverse Engineering Ethereum's Opaque Smart Contracts (Winston Y)

An Empirical Analysis of Anonymity in Zcash (Hans B)

Last modified: May 19, 2023