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Model checking undiscounted reachability and expected-reward properties on Markov decision processes (MDPs) is key for the verification of systems that act under uncertainty. Popular algorithms are policy iteration and variants of value…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks typically exhibit a fundamental safety-capability tradeoff, where improving task performance degrades safety alignment even on benign datasets. This degradation persists across…

We propose a framework for threshold cryptosystems under a permissionless-economic model in which the participants are rational profit-maximizing entities. To date, threshold cryptosystems have been considered under permissioned settings…

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…

In this paper, we present a novel fraud-proof mechanism that achieves fast finality and, when combined with optimistic execution, enables real-time transaction processing. State-of-the-art optimistic rollups typically adopt a 7-day…

Permissionless distributed ledgers provide a promising approach to deal with the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. Since IoT devices mostly generate data transactions and micropayments, distributed ledgers that use fees to regulate the…

Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) is value extractable by temporary monopoly power commonly found in decentralized systems. This extraction stems from a lack of user privacy upon transaction submission and the ability of a monopolist…

Learning reliably safe autonomous control is one of the core problems in trustworthy autonomy. However, training a controller that can be formally verified to be safe remains a major challenge. We introduce a novel approach for learning…

Blockchains is a special type of distributed systems that operates in unsafe networks. In most blockchains, all nodes should reach consensus on all state transitions with Byzantine fault tolerant algorithms, which creates bottlenecks in…

Proof-of-work blockchains need to be carefully designed so as to create the proper incentives for miners to faithfully maintain the network in a sustainable way. This paper describes how the economic engineering of the Conflux Network, a…

Threshold cryptography is essential for many blockchain protocols. For example, many protocols rely on threshold common coin to implement asynchronous consensus, leader elections, and provide support for randomized applications. Similarly,…

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) leverages blockchain-enabled smart contracts to deliver automated and trustless financial services without the need for intermediaries. However, the public visibility of financial transactions on the blockchain…

Machine learning techniques often lack formal correctness guarantees, evidenced by the widespread adversarial examples that plague most deep-learning applications. This lack of formal guarantees resulted in several research efforts that aim…

This paper proposes a safety-critical controller for dynamic and uncertain environments, leveraging a robust environment control barrier function (ECBF) to enhance the robustness against the measurement and prediction uncertainties…

The possibility of errors in human-engineered formal verification software, such as model checkers, poses a serious threat to the purpose of these tools. An established approach to mitigate this problem are certificates -- lightweight,…

The emergence of vertical federated learning (VFL) has stimulated concerns about the imperfection in privacy protection, as shared feature embeddings may reveal sensitive information under privacy attacks. This paper studies the delicate…

In robust Markov decision processes (MDPs), the uncertainty in the transition kernel is addressed by finding a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. While much of the literature has focused on…

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) enable its use on increasingly complex tasks, but the lack of formal safety guarantees still limits its application in safety-critical settings. A common practical approach is to augment the RL…

This work proposes a novel proof-of-work blockchain incentive scheme such that, barring exogenous motivations, following the protocol is guaranteed to be the optimal strategy for miners. Our blockchain takes the form of a directed acyclic…

Blockchain technology has developed significantly over the last decade. One of the reasons for this is its sustainability architecture, which does not allow modification of the history of committed transactions. That means that developers…