ViSP Faculty Members win ICT22 WWTF grants
Two projects, led by Maria Christakis (TU Wien) and Martina Lindorfer (TU Wien), have been honored with ICT22-023 grants by WWTF. Laura Kovacs (TU Wien), Matteo Maffei (TU Wien), Marco Squarcina (TU Wien) and Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias (IST Austria) have joined the winning projects as Co-Principal Investigators. These projects were selected from a competitive pool of 67 short proposals and are part of the exclusive group of 9 projects recognized for their significant contributions to scientific inquiries in the field of information and communication technologies. With a focus on medium-term usability and potential for exploitation, these projects exemplify cutting-edge research and innovation:
ForSmart: Effective Formal Methods for Smart-Contract Certification (Maria Christakis, Laura Kovacs, Matteo Maffei)
ForSmart aims to develop a hybrid, digital methodology for analyzing smart contracts, merging debugging through testing, formal verification, and mathematical proof. This methodology ensures both high reliability and high precision. To maximize the impact of ForSmart, the methodology will be implemented in specific use cases that hold academic, industrial, and public significance. The outcomes will be shared with smart contract developers, auditors, and users. The project intends to utilize existing collaborations with Certora, the Ethereum Foundation, ConsenSys, and Microsoft Research as integral parts of its implementation strategy.
Fixing the Broken Bridge Between Mobile Apps and the Web (Martina Lindorfer, Marco Squarcina)
The project explores the interaction between web and mobile applications and the resulting security and privacy challenges. Methods are developed to automatically analyze the interface between web and mobile platforms, investigating vulnerabilities at both the standardization and implementation levels. Additionally, empirical analysis is conducted to evaluate the impact of the project’s results, followed by the development of strategies to address the identified issues.
SCALE2: Secure, privAte, and interoperable layEr 2 (Georgia Avarikioti, Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Matteo Maffei)
The project, SCALE2, aims to address the limitations of the two leading L2 paradigms, Payment Channel Networks (PCNs) and Rollups. These paradigms have unrealistic assumptions concerning the network, capital requirements, blockchain data publication, and user blockchain monitoring frequency, hindering their practicality. Furthermore, they lack user privacy protection and operate in isolation from other protocols and blockchains. As a result, the design of scalable DeFi and Web 3.0 applications and the widespread use of cryptocurrencies are impeded. SCALE2 will deliver a groundbreaking L2 framework that balances practicality, privacy, interoperability, and bridging of L2 solutions, ushering in a new generation of L2 protocols.
