Introduction

In recent decades, decentralized systems have attracted significant attention from researchers, particularly in the field of software engineering. This growing interest has led to the exploration and application of software engineering technologies in the development of efficient, secure, and reliable decentralized systems. The Software Engineering and Decentralized Systems Lab was established to bring together researchers from both fields, with the aim of advancing decentralized technologies beyond their current limitations. Our group has a strong interest in blockchain — a prominent decentralized technology — and is therefore also known as the Blockchain Lab.

Contact: dangtv@soict.hust.edu.vn (Dr. Tran Van Dang)

Research Directions

Our research interests include, but are not limited to:

• Blockchain Security: Developing algorithms to detect vulnerabilities in blockchain smart contracts and monitor on-chain decentralized applications.
• Decentralized Data Management: Developing novel frameworks for managing, synchronizing, and sharing structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data across distributed systems.
• Data Analytics on Blockchain Networks: Designing data pipelines and analytical tools to process, store, and analyse data available on blockchain networks.
• Decentralized Technologies: Researching core blockchain technologies such as consensus algorithms, smart contract compilers and execution environments, etc.

Research Problems

Some key challenges that we are addressing include:

• Automated verification for smart contracts: Addressing the limitations of dynamic testing by leveraging static analysis to uncover bugs and vulnerabilities before deployment.
• Smart contract audit: Applying AI techniques to identify, explain, and repair bugs and vulnerabilities in smart contracts.
• Interoperability of decentralized data management systems: Developing platforms for decentralized data interoperability, ensuring consistency across multiple systems with heterogeneous data formats (relational data, XML, graph, unstructured data, etc.).
• Programming framework for maintaining data consistency: Designing programming languages for consistency-guaranteed data transformation between diverse data structures.
• Big data platform for DeFi systems: Building a big data platform for DeFi that enables real-time, multi-source data integration and analytics for financial decision support and risk management.
• Security guards for DeFi systems: Monitoring and analysing on-chain data to detect abnormal transactions and potential attacks.

Members

• Dr. Trần Văn Đặng (Head)
• Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyễn Bình Minh
• Dr. Đào Thành Chung
• Dr. Đỗ Bá Lâm
• Dr. Trần Vĩnh Đức
• Dr. Trịnh Tuấn Đạt
• Dr. Nguyễn Đức Anh
• Dr. Nguyễn Hữu Đức
• Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyễn Thị Xuân Hoà
• Assoc. Prof. Dr. Huỳnh Quyết Thắng