Publications by Nicolas Gailly

Improving the Performance of Cryptographic Voting Protocols

Cryptographic voting protocols often rely on methods that require a large number of modular exponentiations. Corresponding performance bottlenecks may appear both on the server and the client side. Applying existing optimization techniques is often mention ...

Springer Nature2020

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

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

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

CHAINIAC: Proactive Software-Update Transparency via Collectively Signed Skipchains and Verified Builds

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

Software-update mechanisms are critical to the security of modern systems, but their typically centralized design presents a lucrative and frequently attacked target. In this work, we propose CHAINIAC, a decentralized software-update framework that elimina ...

USENIX Association2017

Proof-of-Personhood: Redemocratizing Permissionless Cryptocurrencies

Linus Gasser, Nicolas Gailly, Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias, Bryan Alexander Ford, Maria Fernanda Borge Chavez, Philipp Svetolik Jovanovic

Permissionless blockchain-based cryptocurrencies commonly use proof-of-work (PoW) or proof-of-stake (PoS) to ensure their security, e.g. to prevent double spending attacks. However, both approaches have disadvantages: PoW leads to massive amounts of wasted ...

IEEE2017

Scalable Bias-Resistant Distributed Randomness

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

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

Enhancing Bitcoin Security and Performance with Strong Consistency via Collective Signing

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

While showing great promise, Bitcoin requires users to wait tens of minutes for transactions to commit, and even then, offering only probabilistic guarantees. This paper introduces ByzCoin, a novel Byzantine consensus protocol that leverages scalable colle ...

USENIX Association2016

Keeping Authorities “Honest or Bust” with Decentralized Witness Cosigning

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

The secret keys of critical network authorities – such as time, name, certificate, and software update services – represent high-value targets for hackers, criminals, and spy agencies wishing to use these keys secretly to compromise other hosts. To protect ...

IEEE2016