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Committee selection with diversity or distributional constraints is a ubiquitous problem. However, many of the formal approaches proposed so far have certain drawbacks including (1) computationally intractability in general, and (2)…
Programmable blockchains have long been a hot research topic given their tremendous use in decentralized applications. Smart contracts, using blockchains as their underlying technology, inherit the desired properties such as verifiability,…
Technology has positive impacts on many aspects of our social life. Designing a 24hour globally connected architecture enables ease of access to a variety of resources and services. Furthermore, technology like Internet has been a fertile…
Trust models are essential components of networks of any nature, as they refer to confidence frameworks to evaluate and verify if their participants act reliably and fairly. They are necessary to any social, organizational, or computer…
Decentralization is a foundational principle of permissionless blockchains, with consensus mechanisms serving a critical role in its realization. This study quantifies the decentralization of consensus mechanisms in proof-of-stake (PoS)…
We study decentralized cryptocurrency protocols in which the participants do not deplete physical scarce resources. Such protocols commonly rely on Proof of Stake, i.e., on mechanisms that extend voting power to the stakeholders of the…
We argue that recent developments in proof-of-work consensus mechanisms can be used in accordance with advancements in formal verification techniques to build a distributed payment protocol that addresses important economic drawbacks from…
To address the large amount of energy wasted by blockchains, we propose a decentralized consensus protocol for blockchains in which the computation can be used to search for good approximate solutions to any optimization problem. Our…
Blockchain has made an impact on today's technology by revolutionizing the financial industry in its utilization on cryptocurrency and the features it provided on decentralization. With the current trend of pursuing the decentralized…
Permisionless decentralized ledgers ("blockchains") such as the one underlying the cryptocurrency Bitcoin allow anonymous participants to maintain the ledger, while avoiding control or "censorship" by any single entity. In contrast,…
Despite being under development for over 15 years, transaction throughput remains one of the key challenges confronting blockchains, which typically has a cap of a limited number of transactions per second. A fundamental factor limiting…
Blockchain-based consensus protocols present the opportunity to develop new protocols, due to their novel requirements of open participation and explicit incentivization of participants. To address the first requirement, it is necessary to…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is experiencing explosive growth and has gained extensive attention from academia and industry in recent years. Most of the existing IoT infrastructures are centralized, in which the presence of a cloud server…
A blockchain system is a replicated state machine that must be fault tolerant. When designing a blockchain system, there is usually a trade-off between decentralization, scalability, and security. In this paper, we propose a novel…
Blockchain technology enables stakeholders to conduct trusted data sharing and exchange without a trusted centralized institution. These features make blockchain applications attractive to enhance trustworthiness in very different contexts.…
Decentralized systems built around blockchain technology promise clients an immutable ledger. They add a transaction to the ledger after it undergoes consensus among the replicas that run a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) or Byzantine Fault-Tolerant…
In the paper, we present designs for multiple blockchain consensus primitives and a novel blockchain system, all based on the use of trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as Intel SGX-enabled CPUs. First, we show how using TEEs for…
Blockchain-based Distributed Ledgers (DLs) promise to transform the existing financial system by making it truly democratic. In the past decade, blockchain technology has seen many novel applications ranging from the banking industry to…
Voting is a very important issue which can be beneficial in term of choosing the right leader in an election. A good leader can bring prosperity to a country and also can lead the country in the right direction every time. However,…
We present Large-scale Known-committee Stake-based Agreement (LaKSA), a chain-based Proof-of-Stake protocol that is dedicated, but not limited, to cryptocurrencies. LaKSA minimizes interactions between nodes through lightweight committee…