Publications by Verónica del Carmen Estrada Galiñanes

E-Vote Your Conscience: Perceptions of Coercion and Vote Buying, and the Usability of Fake Credentials in Online Voting

Simone Maria Stefano Colombo, Bryan Alexander Ford, Haoqian Zhang, Louis-Henri Manuel Jakob Merino, Verónica del Carmen Estrada Galiñanes

Online voting is attractive for convenience and accessibility, but is more susceptible to voter coercion and vote buying than in-person voting. One mitigation is to give voters fake voting credentials that they can yield to a coercer. Fake credentials appe ...

IEEE2024

Breaking Blockchain Rationality with Out-of-Band Collusion

Bryan Alexander Ford, Haoqian Zhang, Louis-Henri Manuel Jakob Merino, Verónica del Carmen Estrada Galiñanes, Mahsa Bastankhah

Blockchain systems often rely on rationality assumptions for their security, expecting that nodes are motivated to maximize their profits. These systems thus design their protocols to incentivize nodes to execute the honest protocol but fail to consider ou ...

Springer International Publishing Ag2024

ZeroAuction: Zero-Deposit Sealed-Bid Auction via Delayed Execution

Bryan Alexander Ford, Haoqian Zhang, Verónica del Carmen Estrada Galiñanes

Auctions, a long-standing method of trading goods and services, are a promising use case for decentralized finance. However, due to the inherent transparency property of blockchains, current sealed-bid auction implementations on smart contracts requires a ...

Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH2024

TEACHING TECHNOLOGY AND POLITICS: FROM A LESS DESIRABLE TO A PREFERRED DIGITAL NATION

Verónica del Carmen Estrada Galiñanes

Digital nations are embedded in a globally connected civilization largely supported by centralized technology mostly designed with an exported ideology. Our aim is to transform education to enable the conditions for regional innovation and sustainability. ...

European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI)2024

Altruism, reciprocity, and tokens to reward forwarding data: Is that fair?

Verónica del Carmen Estrada Galiñanes, Arman Babaei

Decentralized storage networks offer services with intriguing possibilities to reduce inequalities in an extremely centralized market. Fair distribution of rewards, however, is still a persistent problem in the current generation of decentralized applicati ...

2024

QuePaxa: Escaping the Tyranny of Timeouts in Consensus

Bryan Alexander Ford, Cristina Basescu, Verónica del Carmen Estrada Galiñanes

Leader-based consensus algorithms are fast and efficient under normal conditions, but lack robustness to adverse conditions due to their reliance on timeouts for liveness. We present QuePaxa, the first protocol offering state-of-the-art normal-case efficie ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2023

Flash Freezing Flash Boys: Countering Blockchain Front-Running

Bryan Alexander Ford, Haoqian Zhang, Louis-Henri Manuel Jakob Merino, Verónica del Carmen Estrada Galiñanes

Front-running, the practice of benefiting from advanced knowledge of pending transactions, has proliferated in the cryptocurrency space with the emergence of decentralized finance. Front-running causes devastating losses to honest participants-estimated at ...

IEEE2022

Fair Incentivization of Bandwidth Sharing in Decentralized Storage Networks

Verónica del Carmen Estrada Galiñanes

Peer-to-peer (p2p) networks are not independent of their peers, and the network efficiency depends on peers contributing resources. Because shared resources are not free, this contribution must be rewarded. Peers across the network may share computation po ...

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2022

Snarl: Entangled Merkle Trees for Improved File Availability and Storage Utilization

Verónica del Carmen Estrada Galiñanes

In cryptographic decentralized storage systems, files are split into chunks and distributed across a network of peers. These storage systems encode files using Merkle trees, a hierarchical data structure that provides integrity verification and lookup serv ...

Association for Computing Machinery2021