Dear IC3 Community,

Last week, we hosted the annual IC3 Winter Retreat in Switzerland. Thank you to everyone, including IC3 partners, who made this year’s event a success!

We enjoyed three days in the Swiss mountains connecting, sharing research, and learning from each other. There were 30+ talks touching on a wide-range of topics including Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), governance, digital privacy, consensus mechanisms, cryptography, AI, and more.

We did our best to cover each talk on X, but here’s a recap of six presentations and tutorials that took place at this year's retreat:

1/ Florian Tramér's “Stealing Gen AI’s Secrets”



Our second day keynote talk came from ETH Zürich Assistant Prof. Florian Tramer who explained how vulnerabilities in machine learning interfaces (LLMs like ChatGPT) can lead to leaks of critical information, including details about your model, training data, and application secrets.

To mitigate these risks, Florian says we should avoid deployment on highly transparent platforms such as blockchains.

2/ Luca Zanolini's "Towards a Faster Finality Protocol for Ethereum"

Luca Zanolini from Ethereum Foundation spoke about a protocol for efficiently finalizing Ethereum blocks. The method he describes finalizes blocks proposed by an honest proposer within three slots, even if other proposers are dishonest, using only one voting phase per slot.

Luca says this approach reduces overhead and ensures faster and more predictable block finalization.

3/ James Austgen's "Liquefaction"

James Austgen, PhD student at Cornell Tech, presented his latest research, Liquefaction — a wallet platform that shows how cryptocurrency credentials and assets of a single end-user address can be freely rented, shared, or pooled. Private keys are encumbered in TEEs, which can attach rich, multi-user policies to their use.

This breaks industry notions about exclusive private key use by an individual or individual entity, which has the potential to undermine the security and economic models of many different applications (e.g. locked tokens, DAO voting, airdrops, soulbound tokens, and more).

4/ Jason Ward's “TradFi Assets”

Jason Ward from the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT) spoke about lessons that industry has learned from the 2008 financial crisis and some of the applications of blockchains that have the potential to improve efficiency in financial markets.

5/ Lioba Heimbach's “Attacks on DAOs”

Lioba Heimbach from ETH Zürich presented on various types of DAO governance attacks including protocol vulnerabilities, bribery, and coalition.

She shared some example attacks and provided an empirical analysis to characterize the vulnerability of a set of DAOs to multiple different types of attacks. Here's a link to Lioba's research on the subject.

6/ Andrew Miller's Tutorial on TEEs

Following Andrew Miller’s (Flashbots) presentation on Teleport and TEEs for user-activated interoperability on web2, Andrew showed participants the tutorial for the Dstack project jointly produced by Flashbots and Phala network that does confidential virtual machines inside TEEs.

He answered several audience questions about the Dstack project and went through some of the tutorial information.

Group Activity

Research is important, but so is touching grass (or snow)! That’s why every year we try to do an outdoor activity. This year’s group event was a cliff walk at the Titlis project featuring stunning views.

Welcome Reception & Closing Dinner

We hosted a welcome reception on the Sunday before the retreat kicked off as well as a closing dinner on the final day of the retreat (Jan 8th).

The closing dinner took place in the mountains at the Alpstubli at Trübsee. Dinner guests took in amazing views (and worked up an appetite) hiking to the restaurant.

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Thanks for your support!

Ashley Stanhope,

IC3 Communications & Media Relations

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