Related papers: Proof of Commitment: A Human-Centric Resource for …
We revisit the longstanding open problem of implementing Nakamoto's proof-of-work (PoW) consensus based on a real-world computational task $T(x)$ (as opposed to artificial random hashing), in a truly permissionless setting where the miner…
Most cryptocurrencies rely on Proof-of-Work (PoW) "mining" for resistance to Sybil and double-spending attacks, as well as a mechanism for currency issuance. Hashcash PoW has successfully secured the Bitcoin network since its inception,…
Recent works have proposed new Byzantine consensus algorithms for blockchains based on epidemics, a design which enables highly scalable performance at a low cost. These methods however critically depend on a secure random peer sampling…
Bibliometrics is useful to analyze the research impact for measuring the research quality. Different bibliographic databases like Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar etc. are accessed for evaluating the trend of publications and…
The idle computers on a local area, campus area, or even wide area network represent a significant computational resource---one that is, however, also unreliable, heterogeneous, and opportunistic. This type of resource has been used…
The model of population protocols provides a universal platform to study distributed processes driven by pairwise interactions of anonymous agents. While population protocols present an elegant and robust model for randomized distributed…
Proof-of-Stake blockchains based on a longest-chain consensus protocol are an attractive energy-friendly alternative to the Proof-of-Work paradigm. However, formal barriers to "getting the incentives right" were recently discovered, driven…
We present two attacks targeting the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum consensus protocol. The first attack suggests a fundamental conceptual incompatibility between PoS and the Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree (GHOST) fork choice paradigm…
Purposeful behavior in robotic assistants requires the integration of multiple components and technological advances. Often, the problem is reduced to recognizing explicit prompts, which limits autonomy, or is oversimplified through…
Security mandates today are often in the form of checklists and are generally inflexible and slow to adapt to changing threats. This paper introduces an alternate approach called open mandates, which mandate that vendors must dedicate some…
Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) offers a practical foundation for privacy-preserving machine learning at the edge, with MPC commonly employed to support nonlinear operations. These MPC protocols fundamentally rely on Oblivious Transfer…
Fault-tolerant distributed systems move the trust in a single party to a majority of parties participating in the protocol. This makes blockchain based crypto-currencies possible: they allow parties to agree on a total order of transactions…
Population protocols are a model of distributed computing, in which $n$ agents with limited local state interact randomly, and cooperate to collectively compute global predicates. An extensive series of papers, across different communities,…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic paradigm whereby voters decide on a set of projects to fund with a limited budget. We consider PB in a setting where voters report ordinal preferences over projects and have (possibly) asymmetric…
We propose Conformal Mixed-Integer Constraint Learning (C-MICL), a novel framework that provides probabilistic feasibility guarantees for data-driven constraints in optimization problems. While standard Mixed-Integer Constraint Learning…
Consensus is arguably one of the most important notions in distributed computing. Among asynchronous, randomized, and signature-free implementations, the protocols of Most\'efaoui et al. (PODC 2014 and JACM 2015) represent a landmark…
Many real-world applications are increasingly incorporating automated decision-making, driven by the widespread adoption of ML/AI inference for planning and guidance. This study examines the growing need for verifiable computing in…
Mechanism-mediated service markets with polymatroidal feasibility admit efficient, dominant-strategy incentive-compatible (DSIC) allocation, but these guarantees implicitly assume truthful execution by the marketplace operator. Modelling…
We introduce Unity, a new consensus algorithm for public blockchain settings. Unity is an eventual consistency protocol merging the Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) into a coherent stochastic process. It encompasses hardware and…
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…