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Hello and welcome to Distributed Systems and Blockchain in the News.

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My name is Thomas Bocek and today we have two important topics.

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The first topic is the Ledger Hack and the second topic, the most important one,

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is the announcement of the winner of the challenge task from this semester.

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So let's start with the first article. It's about Ledger. It's a crypto wallet and this

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Ledger wallet suffered a supply chain attack after hackers compromised a crypto protocol

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used in various Web3 applications. While Ledger is a hardware wallet, the connector,

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can compared to MetaMask,

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while MetaMask manages the keys within this plugin,

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within the software, the connector for Ledger,

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which is called Ledger Connect Kit,

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manages the connections to this hardware wallet

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where the keys are managed.

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And this connector from Ledger was attacked.

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And the attack,

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comes from a phishing incident targeting a former Ledger employee which led to

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the publication of malicious version of this Ledger Connect Kit and this rogue

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software rerouted funds to the hackers wallet and although Ledger quickly

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responded with the fix

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and coordinated with other connectors like WalletConnect to stop the attack,

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the hacker could steal over $600,000 in cryptocurrency.

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In the Ledger supply chain attack, the malicious software was active for about 5 hours.

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However, the window

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where funds were actually drained from user's wallet

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was limited to less than two hours.

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Ledger responded, as I mentioned, quickly with a fix,

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mitigating the extent of the attack.

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So, the use of Ledger via this Connect Kit is safe again.

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And the important news is the challenge task winner of this lecture, so I need some drum rolls, please.

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And the winner is Manuel Metzler, Reto Fuhrer and Sascha Häring. Congratulations!

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After winning the challenge task in distributed systems in the spring term, they won again. In this

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challenge task the topic was to implement a blockchain-based solution to a specific problem

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that you identified in your own life or your community with the following requirements:

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In order to pass this course the following requirements have to be met, so, a fully working prototype

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needs to be handed in for your blockchain use case and a public blockchain with at least

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two participants need to be implemented and the students were allowed to use any kind of language,

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framework or platform and most students they chose Ethereum, however, the winning

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group they decided to use ICP from DFINITY. ICP in short for Internet

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Computer Protocol is a blockchain based technology designed to expand the

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functionality of the Internet by enabling decentralized application

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and smart contracts to run at web speed.

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Manuel, Reto and Sascha,

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they implemented a dual deposit system

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that has a mutually assured destruction mechanism

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that discourages fraudulent activities

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from both buyers and sellers.

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For the backend, they used Golang.

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In the frontend, they used Rust

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that was compiled to WebAssembly.

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and for the blockchain as I mentioned they used ICP or canisters, they are

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similar to smart contracts, they were written in Motoko. That's it from my

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side. Again well done twice in a row and you'll receive the certificate with the

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prize money via email. Congratulations!