The one-day BCRB'18 workshop aims at giving researchers a forum to exchange and discuss scientific ideas on open challenges regarding Byzantine consensus in general and specifically on resilient blockchains and distributed ledgers. We want to foster discussion and information exchange between these two (overlapping) communities.

The workshop provides a forum for discussing novel trends in blockchain technology and the role of Byzantine consensus/BFT technology in the development of resilient blockchain technology. It aims at identifying novel threats and attacks to blockchain and BFT technologies, as well as at promoting discussions on methods and system support for improving the resilience and scalability. The workshop shall contribute to identifying new application areas for blockchain and BFT, and identifying open problems and future research challenges for BFT, including the impact of new hardware developments on BFT consensus and blockchain technology.

Topics of interest:

Byzantine Consensus:
- Synchrony, liveness and attacker models revisited – finding the right system model for real Byzantine consensus systems
- Formal verification from abstract algorithms to real-world implementations
- Fault masking, fault detection and fault recovery in BFT systems
- Scalability and confidentiality in BFT systems
- Impact of trusted execution and novel hardware concepts on BFT
- Understanding, teaching, and maintaining real-life BFT systems

Resilient Blockchains:
- Approaches for applying BFT consensus in blockchain technology
- Resilient blockchains as enabler for emerging infrastructures (IoT, car-to-car, Industry 4.0, etc.)
- System support for blockchain
- Real-life implementations and platforms, DevOps and maintenance
- Programming models for blockchain applications
- Smart contracts and incentives
- Anonymity, confidentiality, and scalability of distributed ledgers