On May 21, 2024, the Faculty of Data Science of City University of Macau held an academic lecture with the theme of "Byzantine Fault Tolerance in the Age of Blockchains". The lecture was delivered by Dr. Haibin Zhang, Director of the Information Technology Department of the Yangtze Delta Region Institute of Tsinghua University Zhejiang, and hosted by Professor Wanlei Zhou, Vice Rector and Dean of the Faculty of Data Science, City University of Macau. Guests attending the meeting included Professor Tianqing Zhu, Vice Dean of the Faculty of Data Science, and Assistant Professor Qi Zhong.

 

Dr. Haibin Zhang received his PhD from the University of California, Davis, and currently serves as the Director of the Information Technology Department of the Yangtze Delta Region Institute of Tsinghua University Zhejiang. He has published numerous papers in the fields of distributed systems, applied cryptography and security, and served as a program committee member at several top conferences such as ACM CCS, IEEE S&P, Usenix Security, Asiacrypt and ACM PODC. 

 

In the lecture, Dr. Zhang introduced Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) related technologies in detail from four aspects. This technique is used to order transactions in a distributed system, even if part of the process is controlled by a malicious adversary. BFT is widely used in permissioned blockchain models and is increasingly used in various permissionless blockchains. Dr. Zhang also reviewed and discussed recent BFT protocol research results, covering partially synchronous BFT protocols and fully asynchronous BFT protocols, as well as their building blocks. 

 

The lecture attracted many scholars and students and sparked lively discussions during the question and answer session. Participants highly appreciated Dr. Zhang’s in-depth explanations and professional insights.