Ari Juels, a Professor at Cornell Tech and former Chief Scientist of RSA, joins us to discuss his work on Authenticated Data Feeds for Smart Contracts. These 'Town Crier' feeds would act as bridges between smart contracts and websites, srapping data over TLS and feeding to to a smart contract. Relying on sophisticated hardware enclave technology, one who uses a Town Crier feed would not need to trust its operator as code execution would be guaranteed signed by the hardware.
Ari Juels, a Professor at Cornell Tech (Jacobs Institute) and former Chief Scientist of RSA, joins us to discuss his work two of his blockchain-related research topics: Authenticated Data Feeds for Smart Contracts and criminal smart contracts.
One of the shortcomings of decentralized smart contracts is their inability to retrieve information from the outside world. Smart contracts can’t make API calls to websites and data feeds, but rely on oracles to feed real-world information to the chain. This potentially requires a high trust in the oracle operators. Authenticated data feeds promise to solve the problem by relying on Intel’s novel SGX hardware.
We also talked about how criminals could use smart contracts to more efficiently conduct crimes such as incentivizing the theft of private keys or even soliciting real-world crimes such as murder.
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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/164