Page 69 - Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program Proceedings 2017-18

School of Engineering
Department of Computer Science & Engineering

Blockchain Applications

Supervisor: HUI Pan / CSE
Student: LEE Chak Chiu / COMP Course: UROP1100, Fall

With cryptocurrency being popularized and blockchain technology being tested and used in various business sectors, the
security of blockchain technology is increasingly being concerned and reviewed. Various flaws had been exploited in
different cryptocurrency system, and countermeasures were proposed to handle possible adversaries. This report
discusses various system flaws and attacks on blockchain systems, including double spending problem, Sybil attack, 51%
attack and Tragedy of Commons. It evaluates different Proof-of-X scheme used in blockchain consensus system for
addressing the aforementioned issues and compared them using various aspects, including voting power, the difficulty
of forging block content and difficulty of mining, based on the current implementation in various cryptocurrency system.

Supervisor: HUI Pan / CSE
Student: HU Yao-chieh / COMP Course: UROP2100, Fall
UROP3100, Spring

In spite of the fact that the major contribution of decentralized ledgers, especially in the applications to blockchain and
cryptocurrencies, is to retain states and data which is pertain to the interactions and associations between users to build
the trust between parties that are not in trustful relationship, their potentials encourage them to provide much more
complicated features and characteristics. Smart contracts are rules that are decentralized and stored on chain of blocks,
which can be executed on demand. Moreover, message exchange enables smart contract to talk to each other so as to
access data that are used to save on themselves as well as to trigger each other’s functions. In the scope of this research,
we address a multi-level hierarchical framework that includes two categories of smart contracts: Custodian contract and
Client contract. A custodian contract has the ability to deploy on-demand client contracts, retrieve their data and trigger
their functions to execute particular updates. Additionally, we propose an architecture to enable client contracts to
share common states within the group, in a whole and partially, which might be restricted to mutation only from their
creator, namely custodian contracts. We measure the effectiveness of our solution by creating the addressed structure
and contracts, and deploying them on three different Ethereum testnets: Rinkeby, Kovan, Ropsten.

Supervisor: HUI Pan / CSE
Student: JADOON Asfandyar Khan / CPEG Course: UROP1000, Summer

The process of Peer review has long been used as a means of evaluating the merit of academic works and has not
changed much throughout history. Reviewers and authors are kept in the dark about each other’s identities and reviews
are kept unpublished, all to allow the reviewer to judge submissions freely and without bias. However, without being
open to judgement, reviewers may not feel compelled to produce wok of the highest quality. This paper describes an
open academic publishing and peer reviewing platform that identifies high quality reviews through a trust-less voting
mechanism and creates an audit trail for academic activity to make reviewers accountable for their work. This is done
using blockchain technology and cryptographic signatures.

Supervisor: HUI Pan / CSE
Student: LEE Ting-ting / COMP Course: UROP2100, Fall
UROP3100, Spring
UROP4100, Summer

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