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Distributed algorithms solving agreement problems like consensus or state machine replication are essential components of modern fault-tolerant distributed services. They are also notoriously hard to understand and reason about. Their…
Open-access blockchains based on proof-of-work protocols have gained tremendous popularity for their capabilities of providing decentralized tamper-proof ledgers and platforms for data-driven autonomous organization. Nevertheless, the…
Despite broad use of BFT consensus in blockchains, censorship resistance is weak: leaders can exclude transactions, a growing concern for trading and DeFi. We address this by introducing a new abstraction and protocol stack. First, we…
Recently, enterprises have paid attention to permissioned blockchain (BC), where business transactions among inter-authorized organizations (forming a consortium) can automatically be executed on the basis of a distributed consensus…
Federated learning (FL) is a promising distributed learning solution that only exchanges model parameters without revealing raw data. However, the centralized architecture of FL is vulnerable to the single point of failure. In addition, FL…
Many blockchain-based algorithms, such as Bitcoin, implement a decentralized asset transfer system, often referred to as a cryptocurrency. As stated in the original paper by Nakamoto, at the heart of these systems lies the problem of…
Blockchains are being positioned as the "technology of trust" that can be used to mediate transactions between non-trusting parties without the need for a central authority. They support transaction types that are native to the blockchain…
We propose a new distributed-computing model, inspired by permissionless distributed systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, that allows studying permissionless consensus in a mathematically regular setting. Like in the sleepy model of Pass…
Trustless systems, such as those blockchain enpowered, provide trust in the system regardless of the trust of its participants, who may be honest or malicious. Proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols and DAG-based approaches have emerged as a better…
Although historically the term serverless was also used in the context of peer-to-peer systems, it is more frequently associated with the architectural style for developing cloud-native applications. From the developer's perspective,…
Consensus protocols have traditionally been studied in a setting where all participants are known to each other from the start of the protocol execution. In the parlance of the 'blockchain' literature, this is referred to as the…
Modern blockchains support a variety of distributed applications beyond cryptocurrencies, including smart contracts -- which let users execute arbitrary code in a distributed and decentralized fashion. Regardless of their intended…
Blockchain is an emerging technology that enables new forms of decentralized software architectures, where distributed components can reach agreements on shared system states without trusting a central integration point. Blockchain provides…
The DFINITY blockchain computer provides a secure, performant and flexible consensus mechanism. At its core, DFINITY contains a decentralized randomness beacon which acts as a verifiable random function (VRF) that produces a stream of…
There has been tremendous interest in the development of formal trust models and metrics through the use of analytics (e.g., Belief Theory and Bayesian models), logics (e.g., Epistemic and Subjective Logic) and other mathematical models.…
Increased interest in scalable and high-throughput blockchains has led to an explosion in the number of committee selection methods in the literature. Committee selection mechanisms allow consensus protocols to safely select a committee, or…
Classic BFT consensus protocols guarantee safety and liveness for all clients if fewer than one-third of replicas are faulty. However, in applications such as high-value payments, some clients may want to prioritize safety over liveness.…
Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a key paradigm for building Trustworthy AI systems by enabling privacy-preserving, decentralized model training. However, FL is highly susceptible to adversarial attacks that compromise model integrity…
Blockchain, also coined as decentralized AI, has the potential to empower AI to be more trustworthy by creating a decentralized trust of privacy, security, and audibility. However, systematic studies on the design principle of blockchain as…
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…