Invokedynamic | Tom Van Cutsem's blog

Consensus is the part of my Distributed Systems course where students’ eyes glaze over.

AI was built in Python.

I recently attended a “vibe coding” workshop as part of our lab retreat.

Over the last few months my PhD student Weihong Wang and me have been studying issues with Web3’s “serving layer” – the infrastructure that makes data stored on a blockchain accessible to the application layer (aka decentralized apps or “dapps”).

It is no secret that participating as a validator node (aka “full node”) in the Ethereum blockchain requires non-trivial hardware and storage resources.

If you have ever looked at how Ethereum smart contracts are developed in the Solidity programming language, you will know that one of the most critical aspects of the code are the so-called “access control checks”: short conditional tests that check wheth…

How effective are Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools at finding bugs in consensus-critical code in application-specific blockchains?

This past semester I had the pleasure of running a seminar course in KU Leuven’s brand new Advanced Master of Cybersecurity.

After (almost) 9 years at Bell Labs (first as a researcher, then as a department head) I have recently made the decision to move back to academia, while remaining affiliated with the Labs in a limited advisory research role.

In the last few years, with my colleagues at Nokia Bell Labs, I’ve been looking into how machine learning can help improve software development, helping developers write code better and faster by leveraging the large amounts of open source code that are n…