Related papers: Federated Byzantine Quorum Systems (Extended Versi…
Our work focuses on the design of a scalable permissionless blockchain in the proof-of-stake setting. In particular, we use a distributed hash table as a building block to set up randomized shards, and then leverage the sharded architecture…
Existing permissioned blockchains often rely on coordination-based consensus protocols to ensure the safe execution of applications in a Byzantine environment. Furthermore, these protocols serialize the transactions by ordering them into a…
Blockchain technology has become a trusted method for establishing secure and transparent transactions through a distributed, encrypted network. The operation of blockchain is governed by consensus algorithms, among which Proof of Stake…
Blockchains are distributed data structures that are used to achieve consensus in systems for cryptocurrencies (like Bitcoin) or smart contracts (like Ethereum). Although blockchains gained a lot of popularity recently, there is no…
Many aspects of blockchain-based decentralized finance can be understood as an extension of classical distributed computing. In this paper, we trace the evolution of two interrelated notions: failure and fault-tolerance. In classical…
This paper introduces a family of leaderless Byzantine fault tolerance protocols, built around a metastable mechanism via network subsampling. These protocols provide a strong probabilistic safety guarantee in the presence of Byzantine…
This paper describes a simple and efficient Binary Byzantine faulty tolerant consensus algorithm using a weak round coordinator and the partial synchrony assumption to ensure liveness. In the algorithm, non-faulty nodes perform an initial…
We define and analyze three mechanisms for getting common knowledge, a posteriori truths about the world onto a blockchain in a decentralized setting. We show that, when a reasonable economic condition is met, these mechanisms are…
Consensus is one of the most fundamental distributed computing problems. In particular, it serves as a building block in many replication based fault-tolerant systems and in particular in multiple recent blockchain solutions. Depending on…
As blockchains continue to seek to scale to a larger number of nodes, the communication complexity of protocols has become a significant priority as the network can quickly become overburdened. Several schemes have attempted to address…
The blockchain initially gained traction in 2008 as the technology underlying bitcoin, but now has been employed in a diverse range of applications and created a global market worth over $150B as of 2017. What distinguishes blockchains from…
Population protocols model information spreading and computation in network systems where pairwise node exchanges are determined by an external random scheduler and nodes have small memory. Most of the population protocols in the literature…
Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) consensus is a fundamental primitive for distributed computation. However, BFT protocols suffer from the ordering manipulation, in which an adversary can make front-running. Several protocols are proposed to…
The development of fault-tolerant distributed systems that can tolerate Byzantine behavior has traditionally been focused on consensus protocols, which support fully-replicated designs. For the development of more sophisticated…
Recent developments in blockchain technology have inspired innovative new designs in resilient distributed and database systems. At their core, these blockchain applications typically use Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols to…
The rapid evolution of Internet of Things (IoT) environments has created an urgent need for secure and trustworthy distributed computing systems, particularly when dealing with heterogeneous devices and applications where centralized trust…
The public blockchain was originally conceived to process monetary transactions in a peer-to-peer network while preventing double-spending. It has since been extended to numerous other applications including execution of programs that exist…
Recently, the blockchain technique was put in the spotlight as it introduced a systematic approach for multiple parties to reach consensus without needing trust. However, the application of this technique in practice is severely restricted…
Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) systems are considered by the systems research community to be state of the art with regards to providing reliability in distributed systems. BFT systems provide safety and liveness guarantees with reasonable…
Distributed consensus mechanisms have been widely researched and made popular with a number of blockchain-based token applications, such as Bitcoin, and Ethereum. Although these general-purpose platforms have matured for scale and security,…