Publications related to Distributed ledger

The Privacy Power of Correlated Noise in Decentralized Learning

Rachid Guerraoui, Martin Jaggi, Youssef Allouah, Anastasiia Koloskova, Aymane El Firdoussi

Decentralized learning is appealing as it enables the scalable usage of large amounts of distributed data and resources (without resorting to any central entity), while promoting privacy since every user minimizes the direct exposure of their data. Yet, wi ...

PMLR2024

Building Strongly-Consistent Systems Resilient to Failures, Partitions, and Slowdowns

Cristina Basescu

Distributed systems designers typically strive to improve performance and preserve availability despite failures or attacks; but, when strong consistency is also needed, they encounter fundamental limitations. The bottleneck is in replica coordination, whi ...

EPFL2023

DIABLO: A Benchmark Suite for Blockchains

Rachid Guerraoui, Gauthier Jérôme Timothée Voron, Vincent Gramoli, Andrei Lebedev

With the recent advent of blockchains, we have witnessed a plethora of blockchain proposals. These proposals range from using work to using time, storage or stake in order to select blocks to be appended to the chain. As a drawback it makes it difficult fo ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2023

Scalable and Privacy-Preserving Federated Principal Component Analysis

Jean-Pierre Hubaux, Juan Ramón Troncoso-Pastoriza, Apostolos Pyrgelis, David Jules Froelicher, Joao André Gomes de Sá e Sousa, Jean-Philippe Léonard Bossuat

Principal component analysis (PCA) is an essential algorithm for dimensionality reduction in many data science domains. We address the problem of performing a federated PCA on private data distributed among multiple data providers while ensuring data confi ...

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2023

Health data privacy through homomorphic encryption and distributed ledger computing: an ethical-legal qualitative expert assessment study

Marcello Ienca

Background: Increasingly, hospitals and research institutes are developing technical solutions for sharing patient data in a privacy preserving manner. Two of these technical solutions are homomorphic encryption and distributed ledger technology. Homomorph ...

BMC2022

Toward Mobile Distributed Ledgers

Boi Faltings, Sujit Prakash Gujar, Dimitrios Chatzopoulos, Anurag Jain

Advances in mobile computing have paved the way for new types of distributed applications that can be executed solely by mobile devices on Device-to-Device (D2D) ecosystems (e.g., crowdsensing). Sophisticated applications, like cryptocurrencies, need distr ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2022

The Universal Gossip Fighter

Rachid Guerraoui, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Anastasiia Kucherenko, Rafaël Benjamin Pinot

The notion of adversary is a staple of distributed computing. An adversary typically models “hostile” assumptions about the underlying distributed environment, e.g., a network that can drop messages, an operating system that can delay processes or an attac ...

IEEE2022

CALYPSO: Private Data Management for Decentralized Ledgers

Bryan Alexander Ford, Linus Gasser, Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias, Philipp Svetolik Jovanovic, Enis Ceyhun Alp

Distributed ledgers provide high availability and integrity, making them a key enabler for practical and secure computation of distributed workloads among mutually distrustful parties. Many practical applications also require strong confidentiality, howeve ...

2021

Decentralising the patent system

Gaétan Jean A de Rassenfosse, Kyle William Higham

Modern patent systems are slow, inefficient, expensive, and may result in outcomes that actively harm technological progress. This paper proposes a substantive re-think of these systems and lays a foundation upon which practical solutions can be built. Man ...

ELSEVIER INC2021

Learning from History for Byzantine Robust Optimization

Martin Jaggi, Sai Praneeth Reddy Karimireddy, Lie He

Byzantine robustness has received significant attention recently given its importance for distributed and federated learning. In spite of this, we identify severe flaws in existing algorithms even when the data across the participants is identically distri ...

JMLR-JOURNAL MACHINE LEARNING RESEARCH2021

Privacy-preserving photo sharing based on blockchain

Touradj Ebrahimi, Pablo Pfister

Sharing photos online has become an extremely popular activity, raising a wide concern on privacy issues related to the shared content. ProShare, a photo-sharing solution developed by Multimedia Signal Processing Group of EPFL addresses some of these priva ...

SPIE-INT SOC OPTICAL ENGINEERING2020

Drynx: Decentralized, Secure, Verifiable System for Statistical Queries and Machine Learning on Distributed Datasets

Jean-Pierre Hubaux, Juan Ramón Troncoso-Pastoriza, David Jules Froelicher, Joao André Gomes de Sá e Sousa

Data sharing has become of primary importance in many domains such as big-data analytics, economics and medical research, but remains difficult to achieve when the data are sensitive. In fact, sharing personal information requires individuals' unconditiona ...

2020

Secure, Confidential Blockchains Providing High Throughput and Low Latency

Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias

One of the core promises of blockchain technology is that of enabling trustworthy data dissemination in a trustless environment. What current blockchain systems deliver, however, is slow dissemination of public data, rendering blockchain technology unusabl ...

EPFL2019

Rethinking General-Purpose Decentralized Computing

Bryan Alexander Ford, Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias, Georgia Fragkouli, Enis Ceyhun Alp

While showing great promise, smart contracts are difficult to program correctly, as they need a deep understanding of cryptography and distributed algorithms, and offer limited functionality, as they have to be deterministic and cannot operate on secret da ...

Association for Computing Machinery2019

MedChain: Accountable and Auditable Data Sharing in Distributed Medical Scenarios

Jean-Pierre Hubaux, Bryan Alexander Ford, Juan Ramón Troncoso-Pastoriza, Linus Gasser, Jean Louis Raisaro

The current trend towards personalized medicine creates an urgent need to share data among different hospitals and health institutions, which endangers the privacy of the data subjects if not done with the appropriate precautions. Conversely, the frequency ...

2019

Channels: Horizontal Scaling and Confidentiality on Permissioned Blockchains

Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias, Christian Cachin

Sharding, or partitioning the system's state so that different subsets of participants handle it, is a proven approach to building distributed systems whose total capacity scales horizontally with the number of participants. Many distributed ledgers have a ...

SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG2018

OmniLedger: A Secure, Scale-Out, Decentralized Ledger via Sharding

Bryan Alexander Ford, Linus Gasser, Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias, Philipp Svetolik Jovanovic, Nicolas Gailly

Designing a secure permissionless distributed ledger (blockchain) that performs on par with centralized payment processors, such as Visa, is a challenging task. Most existing distributed ledgers are unable to scale-out, i.e., to grow their total processing ...

IEEE2018

Governing the Use of Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies: Not One-Size-Fits-All

Marie-Valentine Renée Agnès Florin

Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) have the capacity to improve how many companies and organizations conduct transactions or store information securely, among many other potential benefits. However, their development and implementation d ...

2018

Trusted Registration, Negotiation, and Service Evaluation in Multi-Agent Systems throughout the Blockchain Technology

Michael Ignaz Schumacher, Alevtina Dubovitskaya

Some recent trends in distributed intelligent systems rely extensively on agent-based approaches. The so-called Multi Agent Systems (MAS) are taking over the management of sensitive data on behalf of their producers and users (e.g., medical records, financ ...

IEEE2018

Scalable Bias-Resistant Distributed Randomness

Bryan Alexander Ford, Linus Gasser, Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias, Philipp Svetolik Jovanovic, Nicolas Gailly, Ismail Khoffi

Bias-resistant public randomness is a critical component in many (distributed) protocols. Existing solutions do not scale to hundreds or thousands of participants, as is needed in many decentralized systems. We propose two large-scale distributed protocols ...

IEEE2017