PENCIL - Workshop on Privacy ENhancing Cryptography In Ledgers

Darmstadt, Germany – May 18, 2019 – in conjunction with EUROCRYPT 2019

News and updates

• Submission deadline is now on February 15, 2019 AoE.
• Thanks to our sponsors, we can waive the registration fee for (some) students! For more details, see below!

The Workshop

Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) have emerged as one of the most revolutionary developments in recent years, with the goal of eliminating centralized intermediaries and installing distributed trusted services. They facilitate trustworthy trades and exchanges over the Internet, power cryptocurrencies, ensure transparency for documents, and much more.

Although based on cryptographic techniques at their core, the currently deployed DLTs do not address privacy. Indeed, the very idea of a public ledger that stores a verifiable record of transactions at first appears inherently incompatible with the privacy requirements of many potential applications, which handle sensitive data such as trade secrets and personal information. New cryptographic techniques and protocols are therefore needed to protect the data, facilitate these applications, and make DLTs deliver on their promises.

The purpose of the proposed workshop on Privacy-Enhancing Cryptography in Ledgers is to bring together researchers and practitioners working in cryptography, security, and distributed systems from academia and industry, who are interested in cryptographic techniques for improving the privacy of blockchains and their protocols. The main goal is to foster information exchange between attendees from the different areas, to present new developments in cryptographic schemes and protocols, as well as applications and challenges in order to stimulate both use of new cryptographic techniques to improve DLT-based systems as well as future cryptographic research targeting applications in DLT.

Call for PAPERS

The workshop on Privacy-Enhancing Cryptography in Ledgers aims at discussing questions of confidentiality, privacy, scalability, and integrity in the context of distributed ledger technologies and cryptocurrencies. The workshop solicits submissions describing current work addressing decentralized cryptocurrencies and distributed ledger technologies, including cryptographic schemes and techniques, analytical results, work on systems, and/or position papers, with a focus on the area of privacy and confidentiality.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to

• Techniques for transaction confidentiality in distributed ledger technologies
• Anonymity and privacy in distributed ledgers
• Cryptographic schemes and protocols with applications in distributed ledgers
• Consensus mechanisms for distributed ledger technologies
• Incentivation and distributed consensus among selfish nodes
• Privacy-preserving smart contracts and cryptocurrencies
• Trust models for smart contracts
• Applications of blockchains, such as in secure computation
• Systems implementing privacy-preserving distributed ledgers and blockchains
• Reports on practical deployments on privacy-preserving distributed ledger technologies

Submissions should be written in English, formatted in single-column letter-sized or A4-sized format, and prepared as a PDF file. Submissions have to include: a title, author names and affiliations, and must not exceed eight pages, including references. Since there will be no proceedings, the eight pages are expected to give a precise idea of what will be presented at the workshop. Additional material such as a more detailed description or presentation slides may be added in an optional appendix. Papers must be submitted electronically.

Abstracts of the presentations will be distributed to the workshop participants. As there will be no proceedings, presenting work at PENCIL does not conflict with prior, concurrent, or subsequent publication of the material in any other conference or journal.

The submission server is now open!

Keynote talks

The program of the workshop will include 3 keynote talks given by 

Planned schedule

Organizers

Björn Tackmann (BTA@zurich.ibm.com), IBM Research – Zurich, Switzerland
Ivan Visconti (visconti@unisa.it), University of Salerno, Italy

Program Committee

Registration and venue

The workshop takes place in connection with the EUROCRYPT 2019 conference. Registration will in February via the EUROCRYPT registration site.