A few days late, but still: happy 30th ann, JavaScript! Here's a good write-up of the origin story. In my uni class I always remind students of Crock's genius quote: JS is not Java, it's "a Lisp in C's clothing" arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025...
Glad to be in Ghent at the ICP meetup. Giving a talk on Self-sovereign Apps, and the research ongoing in my group on developing scalable Wasm-based smart contracts
✔️ Paper/Poster Submission Deadline: 7 Jan 2026
✔️ Acceptance Notification: 18 Mar 2026
✔️ Conference: June 1-5 2026 (Brisbane, Australia)
I'm serving on the #ICBC 2026 PC, IEEE's flagship conference on Blockchain and cryptocurrency focused research. Consider submitting a paper if you’re working in this area.
Full CFP at icbc2026.ieee-icbc.org
There’s a tool called Lavamoat that can load your deps in an isolated environment, and auto-generate a policy file to regulate per-dependency access to powerful globals. See lavamoat.github.io
Weihong will present our paper on this new protocol at IEEE #ICDCS 2025 in Glasgow next Monday.
For a high-level overview of our work, read my blog:
👉 tvcutsem.github.io/2025/07/parp...
#blockchain #web3 #research
To address this, we designed a new RPC protocol that enables interaction with permissionless blockchains in a way that remains truly depermissioned — without sacrificing data integrity or accountability, two issues that often arise when relying on anonymous public RPC endpoints.
One of our key findings is that, despite the “permissionless” nature of most major blockchain networks, access to them is often highly permissioned in practice. Due to both technical and economic constraints, access is typically funneled through centralized gatekeepers.
🔬 Research update: Depermissioning Web3’s Serving Layer
Over the past few months, my PhD student Weihong Wang and I have been exploring challenges in Web3’s “serving layer” — the infrastructure responsible for making blockchain data accessible to decentralized applications (dapps).
Worth a read: Erik Meijer's latest piece in ACM Queue. He introduces a PL with an interesting mix of natural language instructions, logic variables and Excel-like formulas to let end-users generate readable and verifiable calculations. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...
And obviously humans value clarity in responses ;-) Also, for code and math in particular, one can make the LLM's answers partly verifiable (run the code, check the proof, etc.)
I believe part of it is the RLHF (reinforcement learning with human feedback) - modern LLMs are not only trained to predict the next word in a dataset, they're also trained by producing multiple responses to questions and let humans rank the outputs based on their preference.
So, despite all the flaws and limitations of LLM use in general, for math/coding, I couldn't help but be reminded of Jobs's quote. What do you call a rickety bicycle that usually gets you to where you want to be, but sometimes breaks down unexpectedly? Velocipedes for the mind? :-)
Steve Jobs once famously called computers "bicycles for the mind". The last few days I've been coding and reviewing math problems with the help of recent LLMs, and the clarity with which they lay out coding & math problems is really staggering.
And no, he's not hyping AI or making silly predictions such as "nobody will need to write code anymore". It's a nuanced opinion from somebody who saw the power of deep learning coming long before most others did.
I can highly HIGHLY recommend watching Karpathy's latest talk on "Software 3.0" (software in the era of AI) - it's a treasure trove of insightful analogies, and full of good advice on how to build modern apps with AI integration www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCEm...
My 12yo son had to write an essay on the future of AI for school. When asked what would be the hardest job to get replaced by AI in the future, he answered: Parenting. Love it.
💼 Full-time research roles, multi-year perspective, in a vibrant >100-person team. Based in Leuven at KU Leuven (top-50 globally). Interested? Check distrinet.cs.kuleuven.be/jobs/jobs 🔗 Like or share to spread the word! 🙌
🧑🔬 Post-doc Opportunity: Seeking a researcher with expertise in Trusted Distributed Systems. Work at KU Leuven’s science campus in Leuven, Belgium! 📍 Flexible start in Q4 2025. #PostDoc #Blockchain
📚 PhD Opportunities at DistriNet:
• Secure WebAssembly-based smart contracts (Programming Languages + Security)
• Full-stack software frameworks for decentralized apps (Software Engineering + Blockchain) Top-50 university, international team! 🏛️ #PhD #Web3
🚀 Join @distrinet.bsky.social at KU Leuven for cutting-edge research in Blockchain & Local-first Software! We’re building tools for secure, scalable decentralized apps with Web3 industry partners. 🤝 #Blockchain #ResearchJobs
All prepared to speak again about how to build "Least-authority" JavaScript apps, next week at #SecAppDev in Leuven. I'll talk about how you can use dialects like HardenedJS and tools like Lavamoat to sandbox your module dependencies. Live demo included: github.com/tvcutsem/lav...
Sign up to our Summer School on Security & Privacy in the Age of AI organized by #KULeuven, Sept. 9-12. Attend insightful lectures on the intersection of #ML and #cybersecurity, expand your skills, and connect with peers and international experts.
Details: cybersecurity-research.be/summer-schoo...
Sign up to our PHD School on Security Testing and Verification, a 4-day course into dynamic & static application security testing, and software verification! From July 7 to 10, in Brussels. Organized by #VUB and #kuleuven. Top lecturers!
Details: cybersecurity-research.be/summer-schoo...
