Blockchains promise trust without intermediaries - but only if their security assumptions hold.
To push throughput from tens to thousands of transactions per second, the industry and market now leans towards Layer 2 (L2) solutions such as Payment Channel Networks, Optimistic Rollups, Zero-Knowledge Rollups, Validium and Volition.
This talk presents a concise tour of the first comprehensive taxonomy of those assumptions.
Block, Inc. (NYSE: SQ) is a global technology company with a focus on financial services. Made up of Square, Cash App, Spiral, TIDAL, and TBD, we build tools to help more people access the economy. Square helps sellers run and grow their businesses with its integrated ecosystem of commerce solutions, business software, and banking services. With Cash App, anyone can easily send, spend, or invest their money in stocks or Bitcoin. Spiral builds and funds free, open-source Bitcoin projects. Artists use TIDAL to help them succeed as entrepreneurs and connect more deeply with fans. TBD is building an open developer platform to make it easier to access Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies without having to go through an institution.
This session will cover my transition from academic security research at Northeastern’s Seclab into a role of industrial security engineering. We will dive into recent major infrastructure security projects at Block, such as a system to integrate acquisitions into the Block service mesh and bringing security infrastructure features from our Data Center and AWS EKS to AWS Lambda. Through these deep dives we will share how an academic background helps in industrial security engineering.