Sustainable Blockchains

Location: online

Date/Time: 2024-10-21 17:00 ‒ 18:00

Abstract: Global ICT electricity consumption is already beyond 11 percent of the worldwide electricity production and still increasing. By 2030 it may reach around 25 percent. Previous approaches to improve efficiency and performance have often sacrificed security, leading to disastrous security issues like Meltdown and Spectre. Patching just these two vulnerabilities increases power consumption on affected computers by a seemingly harmless 5 percent. By 2030, this may be more than 1 percent of the global electricity production by just a single out of thousands of patches. This development is not sustainable, and in this talk, we will discuss both the problem and potential revolutionary solutions.

The talk is a part of the Public Lecture Series ‘Sustainability in Computer Science’ under the auspices of Informatik Austria.

Bio: Daniel Gruss is a professor in Information Security at the Graz University of Technology, Institute of Applied Information Processing and Communications. He finished his PhD with distinction in less than 3 years. He has been involved in teaching operating system undergraduate courses since 2010. Daniel’s research focuses on software-based attacks and defenses on microarchitectural layers in hardware and software. He implemented the first remote fault attack running in a website, known as Rowhammer.js. He frequently speaks at top international venues, such as Black Hat, Usenix Security, IEEE S&P, ACM CCS, Chaos Communication Congress, and others. His research team was one of the teams that found the Meltdown and Spectre bugs published in early 2018 and designed the software patch (KAISER) against Meltdown which is now integrated in every operating system.