Related papers: Anarchy in Tor: Performance Cost of Decentralizati…
Analyzing data owned by several parties while achieving a good trade-off between utility and privacy is a key challenge in federated learning and analytics. In this work, we introduce a novel relaxation of local differential privacy (LDP)…
We analyze Decentralized Online Optimization algorithms using the Performance Estimation Problem approach which allows, to automatically compute exact worst-case performance of optimization algorithms. Our analysis shows that several…
Darknet technology such as Tor has been used by various threat actors for organising illegal activities and data exfiltration. As such, there is a case for organisations to block such traffic, or to try and identify when it is used and for…
We consider a decentralized convex unconstrained optimization problem, where the cost function can be decomposed into a sum of strongly convex and smooth functions, associated with individual agents, interacting over a static or…
Most permissionless blockchain networks run on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, which offer flexibility and decentralization at the expense of performance (e.g., network latency). Historically, this tradeoff has not been a bottleneck for most…
Congestion games are popular models often used to study the system-level inefficiencies caused by selfish agents, typically measured by the price of anarchy. One may expect that aligning the agents' preferences with the system-level…
Traditional blockchain design gives miners or validators full control over transaction ordering, i.e., they can freely choose which transactions to include or exclude, as well as in which order. While not an issue initially, the emergence…
Modern public blockchains like Ethereum rely on p2p networks to run distributed and censorship-resistant applications. With its wide adoption, it operates as a highly critical public ledger. On its transition to become more scalable and…
Privacy of users in P2P networks goes far beyond their current usage and is a fundamental requirement to the adoption of P2P protocols for legal usage. In a climate of cold war between these users and anti-piracy groups, more and more users…
The design of distributed algorithms is central to the study of multiagent systems control. In this paper, we consider a class of combinatorial cost-minimization problems and propose a framework for designing distributed algorithms with a…
The Tor network enhances clients' privacy by routing traffic through an overlay network of volunteered intermediate relays. Tor employs a distributed protocol among nine hard-coded Directory Authority (DA) servers to securely disseminate…
Tolling, or congestion pricing, has emerged as an effective tool for preventing gridlock in traffic systems. However, tolls are currently mostly designed on route-based traffic assignment models (TAM), which may be unrealistic and…
The Tor network is a widely used system for anonymous communication. However, Tor is known to be vulnerable to attackers who can observe traffic at both ends of the communication path. In this paper, we show that prior attacks are just the…
When people choose routes minimizing their individual delay, the aggregate congestion can be much higher compared to that experienced by a centrally-imposed routing. Yet centralized routing is incompatible with the presence of…
Traffic correlation attacks to de-anonymize Tor users are possible when an adversary is in a position to observe traffic entering and exiting the Tor network. Recent work has brought attention to the threat of these attacks by network-level…
Off-chain transaction channels represent one of the leading techniques to scale the transaction throughput in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. They allow multiple agents to route payments through one another. So far, the topology and…
Analysis of efficiency of outcomes in game theoretic settings has been a main item of study at the intersection of economics and computer science. The notion of the price of anarchy takes a worst-case stance to efficiency analysis,…
We study the extent to which decentralized cost-sharing protocols can achieve good price of anarchy (PoA) bounds in network cost-sharing games with $n$ agents. We focus on the model of resource-aware protocols, where the designer has prior…
This paper considers a cost minimization problem for data centers with N servers and randomly arriving service requests. A central router decides which server to use for each new request. Each server has three types of states (active, idle,…
According to the proportional allocation mechanism from the network optimization literature, users compete for a divisible resource -- such as bandwidth -- by submitting bids. The mechanism allocates to each user a fraction of the resource…