Related papers: LaKSA: A Probabilistic Proof-of-Stake Protocol
Blockchain protocols implement total-order broadcast in a permissionless setting, where processes can freely join and leave. In such a setting, to safeguard against Sybil attacks, correct processes rely on cryptographic proofs tied to a…
The core of a blockchain network is its consensus algorithm. Starting with the Proof-of-Work, there have been various versions of consensus algorithms, such as Proof-of-Stake (PoS), Proof-of-Authority (PoA), and Practical Byzantine Fault…
In recent years, significant research efforts have focused on improving blockchain throughput and confirmation speeds without compromising security. While decreasing the time it takes for a transaction to be included in the blockchain…
We introduce a new permissionless blockchain architecture called ABC. ABC is completely asynchronous, and does rely on neither randomness nor proof-of-work. ABC can be parallelized, and transactions have finality within one round trip of…
This master thesis deals with Blockchain Technology in mobile turn based peer to peer games. First, it investigates the capabilities of Blockchain Technology to be used for gaming applications. In this regard, among others,…
A proof-of-randomness (PoR) protocol is presented as a fair and low energy-cost consensus mechanism for blockchains. Each network node of a blockchain may use a true random number generator (TRNG) and hash algorism to fulfil the PoR…
Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies rely on distributed consensus algorithms. In recent years many consensus algorithms and protocols have been proposed; most of them are for permissioned blockchain networks. However, the…
Transaction throughput, confirmation latency and confirmation reliability are fundamental performance measures of any blockchain system in addition to its security. In a decentralized setting, these measures are limited by two underlying…
We present efficient protocols for amortized secure multiparty computation with penalties and secure cash distribution, of which poker is a prime example. Our protocols have an initial phase where the parties interact with a cryptocurrency…
Paxos is an important algorithm for a set of distributed processes to agree on a single value or a sequence of values, for which it is called Basic Paxos or Multi-Paxos, respectively. Consensus is critical when distributed services are…
In today's programmable blockchains, smart contracts are limited to being deterministic and non-probabilistic. This lack of randomness is a consequential limitation, given that a wide variety of real-world financial contracts, such as…
Security protocols often use randomization to achieve probabilistic non-determinism. This non-determinism, in turn, is used in obfuscating the dependence of observable values on secret data. Since the correctness of security protocols is…
The Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol is a de facto standard of secure client-server communication on the Internet. Its security can be diminished by a variety of attacks that leverage on weaknesses in its design and implementations.…
In the Zendoo whitepaper we introduced a novel SNARK-based construction that allows Bitcoin-like blockchains to create and communicate with sidechains of different types without knowing their internal structure. We also introduced a…
We present the first performance comparison of EdDSA and BLS signatures in committee-based consensus protocols through large-scale geo-distributed benchmarks. Contrary to popular beliefs, we find that small deployments (less than 40…
Blockchains face a scalability limitation, partly due to the throughput limitations of consensus protocols, especially when aiming to obtain a high degree of decentralization. Layer 2 Rollups (L2s) are a faster alternative to conventional…
We present the notion of multilevel slashing, where proof-of-stake blockchain validators can obtain gradual levels of assurance that a certain block is bound to be finalized in a global consensus procedure, unless an increasing and…
Distributed ledger technology has gained wide popularity and adoption since the emergence of bitcoin in 2008 which is based on proof of work (PoW). It is a distributed, transparent and immutable database of records of all the transactions…
Low transaction throughput and poor scalability are significant issues in public blockchain consensus protocols such as Bitcoins. Recent research efforts in this direction have proposed shard-based consensus protocols where the key idea is…
Since the inception of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology have attracted an increasing interest from both academia and industry. Among various core components, consensus protocol is the defining technology…