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Crash fault tolerant (CFT) consensus algorithms are commonly used in scenarios where system components are trusted -- e.g., enterprise settings and government infrastructure. However, CFT consensus can be broken by even a single corrupt…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) staking is one of the most prominent applications within the DeFi ecosystem, where DeFi projects enable users to stake tokens on the platform and reward participants with additional tokens. However, logical…
The practical Byzantine fault tolerant (PBFT) consensus mechanism is one of the most basic consensus algorithms (or protocols) in blockchain technologies, thus its performance evaluation is an interesting and challenging topic due to a…
A Confirmation Rule, within blockchain networks, refers to an algorithm implemented by network nodes that determines (either probabilistically or deterministically) the permanence of certain blocks on the blockchain. An example of…
Decentralization is widely recognized as a crucial characteristic of blockchains that enables them to resist malicious attacks such as the 51% attack and the takeover attack. Prior research has primarily examined decentralization in…
In this paper, we propose a fully decentralized and smart contract-based insurance protocol. We identify various issues in the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) insurance context and propose a solution to overcome these shortcomings. We…
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…
The blockchain technology has achieved tremendous success in open (permissionless) decentralized consensus by employing proof-of-work (PoW) or its variants, whereby unauthorized nodes cannot gain disproportionate impact on consensus beyond…
Consensus protocols play a pivotal role to balance security and efficiency in blockchain systems. In this paper, we propose an evaluation framework for blockchain consensus protocols termed as AlphaBlock. In this framework, we compare the…
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…
Byzantine fault-tolerant agreement (BFT) in a partially synchronous system usually requires 3f + 1 nodes to tolerate f faulty replicas. Due to their high throughput and finality property BFT algorithms build the core of recent permissioned…
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 widespread adoption of large-scale machine learning models in recent years highlights the need for distributed computing for efficiency and scalability. This work introduces a novel distributed machine learning paradigm --…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) took shape in 2020. An unprecedented amount of over 14 billion USD moved into DeFi projects offering trading, loans and insurance. But its growth has also drawn the attention of malicious actors. Many projects…
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…
FaB Paxos[5] sets a lower bound of 5f + 1 replicas for any two-step consensus protocols tolerating f byzantine failures. Yet, hBFT[3] promises a two-step consensus protocol with only 3f + 1 replicas. As a result, it violates safety property…
With the advancement of blockchain technology, chained Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocols have been increasingly adopted in practical systems, making their performance a crucial aspect of the study. In this paper, we introduce a…
In this paper, we propose a modularized framework for communication processes applicable to crash and Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols. We abstract basic communication components and show that the communication process of the…
Consensus protocols used today in blockchains often rely on computational power or financial stakes - scarce resources. We propose a novel protocol using social capital - trust and influence from social interactions - as a non-transferable…
Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) protocols have recently been extensively used by decentralized data management systems with non-trustworthy infrastructures, e.g., permissioned blockchains. BFT protocols cover a broad spectrum of design…