Contributors: Joanne Shlapak
The 15th International Conference on Privacy, Security & Trust (PST 2017) was held at the University of Calgary on August 28th to 30th, 2017. The conference brought together experts from industry, academia and the public sector to explore themes and present their latest findings, ideas and developments in the areas of privacy, security and trust.
In addition to the privacy, security and trust themes that are common to the conference, PST 2017 also offered a workshop on blockchain technology and the state of work with the intent of educating industry and research communities and to provide opportunities for collaboration and innovation.
The Blockchain Workshop invited innovators, researchers and practitioners to generate a dialogue on blockchain technology, its current state and its many applications beyond the best-known use for blockchains — cryptocurrency. Blockchains promise to address key challenges of transactional verification and distributed data management in a transparent, distributed and scalable way. This new technology could transform how data is safeguarded in the absence of a centralized, trusted authentication authority typical of the approaches used currently.
Jeremy Clark of Concordia University presented a lecture on an introduction to Bitcoin and Blockchain. This was followed by presentations on industrial applications of Cryptocurrency and Blockchain in general, in both private and public sectors. Dinesh Shah of Bank of Canada introduced Project Jasper which is a state of art practice of using Blockchain technology for electronics payments and transfers between BoC and other financial institutions.
The applications and challenges of using Blockchain technology in the areas of Finance, IoT, Oil and Gas and CleanTech were discussed. The final two lectures by David Kravitz of DarkMatter and Aniket Kate of Purdue University shed light on other aspects and interesting problems when dealing with Blockchain solutions. The problems explained included Identity Management, Key Generation and Revocation, Access Control and User Privacy.
The last two days of PST 2017 included the invited talks as well as accepted paper presentations in the areas of Blockchain, Privacy, Authentication, Mobile and Web Security, Cloud Computing, Internet of Things and Social Network.
Nulli was proud to be a Gold Sponsor of this prestigious, informative and highly regarded international event.
