Information Sciences Seminar——Blockchain based protocols for fair trading

Abstract: Online commerce traditionally needs trusted third parties (TTP) to solve the deadlock where the buyer is willing to do the payment prior to receiving the goods, while the seller won't send the data until the buyer pays. The TTP will withhold the payment until the buyer confirms the goods. However, TTPs tend to be a centralized entity to guarantee the trust, which inevitably increase risks of both privacy leaking and functional failure. Reducing the dependence on TTPs while keeping fairness is a classic open problem for decades.
The fairness, ensuring neither party of the buyer and seller cannot take any advantage over the other, will help to build trustless online trading system that can be highly effective. Participants are able to exchange digitalized goods (or data) without concerns about mistrust. The talk will present protocols proposed recently. They use state-of-the-art cryptographic schemes to achieve fair trading of data by means of blockchain techniques.

Short Bio: Dr. Yu Guo is the Founder/CEO of SETBIT Labs, a newly startup focusing on blockchain technology and blockchain security. He was graduated from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) and received Ph.D. degree in 2007. He had been an associate professor in USTC from 2007-2016, working on formal verification, system software and computer security. His research interests include programming languages, formal verification, system software, cryptography, computer security. He worked in a FIntech company as a technical vice president for two years, owning more than 30 patents about blockchain infrastructure. He found SETBIT Labs in 2018, which reported numerous vulnerabilities smart contracts and attacking events on blockchains, leading the research of smart contract verification, smart contract analysis and cryptographic protocols.