Johanna Ullrich has received the promotional award by the Dr. Maria Schaumayer foundation for her promotion on “Secret Communication in the Internet” (finished in 2016).

The foundation has been founded by the first female governor of a national bank Dr. Maria Schaumayer and supports women following their career path.

The ACB intends to function as the Austrian one stop shop for Blockchain related research and development projects. Together with TU Wien, WU, Universität Wien and RIAT, SBA Research is going to approach interdisciplinary research issues.

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Horizont.at

Cash.at

The paper “A Wild Velvet Fork Appears! Inclusive Blockchain Protocol Changes in Practice” by Alexei Zamyatin, Nicholas Stifter, Aljosha Judmayer, Philipp Schindler, Edgar Weippl and William J. Knottenbelt, in cooperation with the Imperial College Centre for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering (IC3RE), was presented at the 5th Workshop on Bitcoin and Blockchain Research at the Financial Cryptography and Data Security Conference 2018.

Abstract:

The loosely defined terms hard fork and soft fork have established themselves as descriptors of different classes of upgrade mechanisms for the underlying consensus rules of (proof-of-work) blockchains. Recently, a novel approach termed velvet fork, which expands upon the concept of a soft fork, was outlined in [22]. Specifically, velvet forks intend to avoid the possibility of disagreement by a change of rules through rendering modifications to the protocol backward compatible and inclusive to legacy blocks.

We present an overview and definitions of these different upgrade mechanisms and outline their relationships.
Hereby, we expose examples where velvet forks or similar constructions are already actively employed in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, we expand upon the concept of velvet forks by proposing possible applications and discuss potentially arising security implications.

Pre-print version

Following a report on Bitsonline, Butarin commented on our research ‘In my lingo this would be “agreeing on a different state transition function”; I would say it’s definitely a useful kind of fork.’ (reddit)

On Friday, February 23, 2018, professor Angelo Gargantini and his student Marco Radavelli from Università di Bergamo visited SBA’s MATRIS group to discuss common interests in combinatorial testing and discrete mathematics.

Edgar Weippl presents the technical perspective of security in ICOs at IRIS 2018 in Salzburg on Stefan Eder’s panel (E-Commerce – Währungen & Token Panel)

true to our vision statement, being the crystallization point of security research in Austria, we support the proposal for a new K1 research center. SBA Research (Edgar Weippl) coordinates jointly with the University of Vienna (Stefanie Rinderle-Ma) the fundamental research activities in Area 2 “Cryptography, Technology & Security”. (ABC, derBrutkasten).

Everything is set up for April and we’re looking forward to meeting great people for exciting discussions.

National and international companies presented their cyber security related portfolios and discussed potential safety-solutions for energy infrastructure and smart cities.

Among 21 other exhibitors, SBA Research introduced current projects and research.

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Cyber Security Cluster Austria präsentiert Sicherheitslösungen

Cyber Security Cluster Austria: Sicherheitslösungen für Energie-Infrastruktur und Smart Cities

The public kick-off of the Austrian flagship project IoT4CPS took place at TU Vienna on February 1, 2018.

After some welcome notes from Johannes Fröhlich (Vice Rector, TU Vienna), Helmut Leopold (Head of Center for Digital Safety and Security, AIT) and Andreas Eckel (Team Lead Grants, TTTech) we looked into the contents and aims of the project.

The auditorium was then invited to join interactive workshops (one of them led by Katharina Krombholz, SBA) based on the project´s main topics. The official part of the kick-off was eventually concluded by short presentations of the brainstorming outcomes and an expert panel discussion.