October 4, 2018, we will have one excellent talk (room 6.3.38, at 12) by Bruno Vavala.

Bruno Vavala, an ex-LASIGE member that recently graduated at Ciências|ULisboa (from the CMU-PT program), currently Research Scientist at Intel Labs, will talk about his most recent work on Private Data Objects (PDOs), a new technology that enables mutually untrusted parties to run smart contracts over private data.

PDOs result from the integration of a distributed ledger and Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX). In particular, contracts run off-ledger in secure enclaves using Intel SGX, which preserves data confidentiality, execution integrity and enforces data access policies (as opposed to raw data access). A distributed ledger verifies and records transactions produced by PDOs, in order to provide a single authoritative instance of such objects. This allows contracting parties to retrieve and check data related to contract and enclave instances, as well as to serialize and commit contract state updates. The design and the development of PDOs is an ongoing research effort, and open source code is available and hosted by Hyperledger Labs (Linux Foundation).