Related papers: Anarchy in Tor: Performance Cost of Decentralizati…
This study examines the robustness of I2P, a well-regarded anonymous and decentralized peer-to-peer network designed to ensure anonymity, confidentiality, and circumvention of censorship. Unlike its more widely researched counterpart, TOR,…
In networks of autonomous agents (e.g., fleets of vehicles, scattered sensors), the problem of minimizing the sum of the agents' local functions has received a lot of interest. We tackle here this distributed optimization problem in the…
Node counting on a graph is subject to some fundamental theoretical limitations, yet a solution to such problems is necessary in many applications of graph theory to real-world systems, such as collective robotics and distributed sensor…
The modernization of the power system introduces technologies that may improve the system's efficiency by enhancing the capabilities of users. Despite their potential benefits, such technologies can have a negative impact. This subject has…
Distributed peer-to-peer systems are widely popular due to their decentralized nature, which ensures that no peer is critical for the functionality of the system. However, fully decentralized solutions are usually much harder to design, and…
Decentralized decision making in multi--product firms can lead to efficiency losses when autonomous decision makers fail to internalize cross--product demand interactions. This paper quantifies the magnitude of such losses by analyzing the…
Bitcoin is a top-ranked cryptocurrency that has experienced huge growth and survived numerous attacks. The protocols making up Bitcoin must therefore accommodate the growth of the network and ensure security. Security of the Bitcoin network…
We consider a resource allocation problem where individual users wish to send data across a network to maximize their utility, and a cost is incurred at each link that depends on the total rate sent through the link. It is known that as…
Anonymous Communication designs such as Tor build their security on distributed trust over many volunteers running relays in diverse global locations. In practice, this distribution leads to a heterogeneous network in which many versions of…
Network virtualization allows one to build dynamic distributed systems in which resources can be dynamically allocated at locations where they are most useful. In order to fully exploit the benefits of this new technology, protocols need to…
In today's digital society, the Tor network has become an indispensable tool for individuals to protect their privacy on the Internet. Operated by volunteers, relay servers constitute the core component of Tor and are used to geographically…
This position paper argues that agentic AI systems should be designed and evaluated as \emph{marginal token allocation economies} rather than as text generators priced by the unit. We follow a single request -- a developer asking a coding…
We consider the decentralized exploration problem: a set of players collaborate to identify the best arm by asynchronously interacting with the same stochastic environment. The objective is to insure privacy in the best arm identification…
The resource allocation problem consists of the optimal distribution of a budget between agents in a group. We consider such a problem in the context of open systems, where agents can be replaced at some time instances. These replacements…
Within mobility systems, the presence of self-interested users can lead to aggregate routing patterns that are far from the societal optimum which could be achieved by centrally controlling the users' choices. In this paper, we design a…
To ensure that social networks (e.g. opinion consensus, cooperative estimation, distributed learning and adaptation etc.) proliferate and efficiently operate, the participating agents need to collaborate with each other by repeatedly…
Online anonymity and privacy has been based on confusing the adversary by creating indistinguishable network elements. Tor is the largest and most widely deployed anonymity system, designed against realistic modern adversaries. Recently,…
The price of anarchy and price of stability are three well-studied performance metrics that seek to characterize the inefficiency of equilibria in distributed systems. The distinction between these two performance metrics centers on the…
The very nature of operations in peer-to-peer systems such as BitTorrent exposes information about participants to their peers. Nodes desiring anonymity, therefore, often chose to route their peer-to-peer traffic through anonymity relays,…
We study decentralized optimization where multiple agents minimize the average of their (strongly) convex, smooth losses over a communication graph. Convergence of the existing decentralized methods generally hinges on an apriori, proper…