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SUMMARY:Order! A tale of money\, intrigue\, and specifications. - Lorenzo 
 Alvisi\, Cornell University
DTSTART:20220526T140000Z
DTEND:20220526T150000Z
UID:TALK169019@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Srinivasan Keshav
DESCRIPTION:Mistrust over traditional financial institutions is motivating
  the development of decentralized financial infrastructures based on block
 chains. In particular\, Consortium blockchains (such as the Linux Foundati
 on Hyperledger and Facebook’s diem) are emerging as the approach preferr
 ed by businesses. These systems allow only  a well-known set of mutually d
 istrustful parties to add blocks to the blockchain\; in this way\, they ai
 m to retain the benefits of decentralization without embracing the cyberpu
 nk philosophy that informed Nakamoto’s disruptive vision.  At the core o
 f consortium blockchains is State Machine Replication\, a classic techniqu
 e borrowed from fault tolerant distributed computing\; to ensure the robus
 tness of their infrastructure\, consortium blockchains actually borrow the
  Byzantine-tolerant version of this technique\, which guarantees that the 
 blockchain will operate correctly even if as many as about a  third of the
  contributing parties are bent on cheating. \n\nBut\, sometimes\, "a borro
 wing is a sorrowing”.  \n\nI will discuss why Byzantine-tolerant state m
 achine replication is fundamentally incapable of recognizing\, never mind 
 preventing\, an ever present scourge of financial exchanges: the fraudulen
 t manipulation of the order in which transactions are processed — and ho
 w its specification needs to be expanded to give it a fighting chance.  \n
 \nBut is it possible to completely eliminate the ability of Byzantine part
 ies to engage in order manipulation? What  meaningful ordering guarantees 
 can be enforced? And at what cost?\n\nBio:\nLorenzo Alvisi is the Tisch Un
 iversity Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Prior to joi
 ning Cornell\, he held an endowed professorship at UT Austin\, where he is
  now a Distinguished Professor Emeritus. Lorenzo received his Ph.D. in 199
 6 from Cornell\, after earning a Laurea cum Laude in Physics from the Univ
 ersity of Bologna. His research interests span theory and practice of dist
 ributed computing\, with a focus on scaling strong consistency and dependa
 bility guarantees.  He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE\, an Alfred P. Sloa
 n Foundation Fellow\, and the recipient of a Humboldt Research Award\, an 
 NSF Career Award\, and several  teaching awards. He serves on the editoria
 l boards of ACM TOCS and Springer's Distributed Computing\, and on the ste
 ering committee of Eurosys and SOSP. Besides distributed computing\, he is
  passionate about classical music and red Italian motorcycles.
LOCATION:FW11 and https://cl-cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/97216272378?pwd=M2diTFhMT
 nppckJtNWhFVTBKK0REZz09
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