Pioneering Academic Partnerships in Web3 – Tom Van Cutsem | Onchain Soirée [1] @ KU Leuven

All right. Okay. Um, good evening everyone and uh, so my name is Tom Vancutum and uh, I'm not the king of Kolvin. I wish uh, I'm a professor though I'm a professor here at the department of computer science and I'm kind of acting also a bit the local organizer of this event. So also on behalf of K1 very welcome.

So uh I'll just very very briefly say a few things about the location, our sponsors and then I'll hand off to two K1 speakers that have the real meat. Uh so you're welcome here in the department of computer science. This is where we train our computer scientists and we are part of a a broader faculty faculty of engineering science. Um so we do we teach bachelor master computer science here and since a few years we actually also have a new program master in cyber security. Uh so we're running that now for the third year and that's a a new program.

It's a one-year master. Um so we actually have a lot of our students also doing this together with their um work day job and they tend to do it in two years and so have a half year program each. uh if you're interested in that I would definitely recommend uh to check it out. It's actually as part of this master of science in cyber security that I'm also teaching on web3 and blockchain technology. So I'm doing a blockchain course as part of the program where in uh we I take the students on a journey to web three.

We have five weeks of training. Do you actually have some of the students that follow the course? Yeah. Oh, one guy. Okay.

Welcome. So uh what I what I tell so you if if if I'm not telling the truth, he can hold me accountable, right? Uh so what we do in that course is first week we I talk about basics of blockchain. Second week I go back to the roots of blockchain which is peer-to-peer payments. We do Bitcoin as a case study.

Then we level up to smart contracts. We talk about solidity and I use Ethereum as the second case study. Next week is zero knowledge proofs the basics and applications to blockchain things like tornado cache anonymity scalability and the last week we dive into BFT consensus protocols that's also back to the roots PBFT hardcore um and then then it's time for the students to actually do something uh not just listen lay back and listen to me speak then they have to present so some of our students they get assigned a paper a research paper like for instance selfish mining in bitcoin was a big topic a few years ago and they have to dig into that, present it or our more hands-on students, they uh if they prefer programming, we give them a a programming assignment. We give them the spec of a blockchain like a bitcoin-l like blockchain and they have to implement it from scratch in Go or TypeScript and then they have to make sure it's compatible with their fellow students uh nodes to form a peer-to-peer network. So that's what we do in that uh blockchain course.

Um so that's all teaching. We also do research in the university of course in particular we have many people here in the room also from two research groups in the faculty of engineering science that's distrinet and kosk so distrinet is the group where that I'm also part of it's here in the department of computer science we do research on uh software security at large um and then cos is a research group in the uh with the colleagues in the department of of electrical engineering and they are the worldclass cryptograph graphers building new crypto inventing new cryptography and so together we're part of this larger project and they're also co-sponsoring this event is this big cyber security research program it's a five-year project it's funded by the Flemish government it includes not just K1ven you can see there's other universities there's IMC involved and so we bring together all the research focused on cyber security web 3 very relevant because anything you do in web 3 like cyber security is not your number one priority if it's your number one priority, you die. That's basically sort of the brutality of the of the DeFi space and and other protocols, right? Um so in that project, we do full stack research. Some of it is focused on security of the application layer, formal verification.

We focus on security of reusable services like authentication layers. We do system security. Lots of people focus here on trusted execution, things like that, network security, hacking, Wi-Fi, u and then finally uh building secure hardware or even hardware acceleration for advanced cryptography and uh new crypto. And then since uh uh last year, we're actually next to those sort of traditional tracks, we're opening new tracks where we try to sort of look at really applying all of these new techniques to specific platforms. uh blockchain, IoT, 5G, edge.

So blockchain in particular is one emerging area that we recognize as a sort of you know emerging way of building a very trusted cloud platform. So blockchain based systems and so uh we're applying our research to that as well. Um if you're interested in more, every year we do an industry outreach day as part of this research project. Um this year it'll happen November 13th. So mark the date, November 13th.

It's happening in Meccalan Lamote conference center really nice place and so it's typically half a day program we have keynotes we have breakout sessions we had one last year on blockchain and web three and then there's a big demo floor over 40 demos where our researchers tell you what they've been working on in more detail so 13th of November um of course we also do training a lot not to our own students also to industry also to externals we have for instance one one summer school I wanted to draw your attention to is taking place in July in Brussels with the colleagues of the VUB and it's going to be on security testing and verification and uh really interesting also for this crowd maybe is one of our speakers will be Mos he's a formal verification engineer at the Ethereum Foundation and he'll come talk about HVM which is an open source project you can use to do symbolic execution of EVM code that's really cool if you need to um if you want to build like fuss testing tools or analysis tools and you want to find those bugs in uh your EVM based contracts. Um just final words from me is that uh yeah we are university but we hate to do ivory tower research. We're very much open to collaboration with industry. So if you're interested to collaborate with us you should come and talk to not just me. I think there's a a number of researchers here from KOIC distinet.

Can you put up your hands? Yeah. So that people recognize the face. So you can of course talk to my colleagues as well. Uh we're really um open to talk and we always want to learn what's on your mind.