Publications related to DIABLO: A Benchmark Suite for Blockchains

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

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

Towards General-Purpose Decentralized Computing with Permissionless Extensibility

Enis Ceyhun Alp

Smart contracts have emerged as the most promising foundations for applications of the blockchain technology. Even though smart contracts are expected to serve as the backbone of the next-generation web, they have several limitations that hinder their wide ...

EPFL2024

Leaderless consensus

Rachid Guerraoui, Vincent Gramoli, Mihail Igor Zablotchi, Karolos Antoniadis, Antoine Philippe Matthieu Desjardins, Gauthier Jérôme Timothée Voron

Classic synchronous consensus algorithms are leaderless in that processes exchange proposals, choose the maximum value and decide when they see the same choice across a couple of rounds. Indulgent consensus algorithms are typically leader-based. Although t ...

ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE2023

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

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

Infochain: A Decentralized, Trustless and Transparent Oracle on Blockchain

Boi Faltings, Naman Goel, Aris Filos Ratsikas

Blockchain based systems allow various kinds of financial transactions to be executed in a decentralized manner. However, these systems often rely on a trusted third party (oracle) to get correct information about the real-world events, which trigger the f ...

2022

The impact of NFT profile pictures within social network communities

Marco Mattavelli, Simone Casale Brunet

This paper presents an analysis of the role of social media, specifically Twitter, in the context of non-fungible tokens, better known as NFTs. Such emerging technology framing the creation and exchange of digital object, started years ago with early proje ...

ACM2022

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

Differentiated consistency for worldwide gossips

Davide Frey, Pierre-Louis Blaise Roman

Eventual consistency is a consistency model that favors liveness over safety. It is often used in large-scale distributed systems where models ensuring a stronger safety incur performance that are too low to be deemed practical. Eventual consistency tends ...

2022

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

A Blockchain-Supported Framework for Charging Management of Electric Vehicles

Christophe Ballif, Nicolas Würsch, Marina Dorokhova

Profound changes driven by decarbonization, decentralization, and digitalization are disrupting the energy industry, bringing new challenges to its key stakeholders. In the attempt to address the climate change issue, increasing penetration of renewables a ...

MDPI2021

Networks of Ethereum Non-Fungible Tokens: A graph-based analysis of the ERC-721 ecosystem

Marco Mattavelli, Simone Casale Brunet

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as a decentralized proof of ownership represent one of the main reasons why Ethereum is a disruptive technology. This paper presents the first systematic study of the interactions occurring in a number of NFT ecosystems. We illus ...

IEEE2021

Rational Agreement in the Presence of Crash Faults

Vincent Gramoli, Alejandro Ranchal Pedrosa

Blockchain systems need to solve consensus despite the presence of rational users and failures. The notion of (k, t)-robustness is key to derive impossibility results with k rational players and t faulty players. However, these t faulty players are always ...

IEEE2021

CALYPSO: Private Data Management for Decentralized Ledgers

Linus Gasser, Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias, Bryan Alexander Ford, 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

Clouseau: Blockchain-based Data Integrity for HDFS Clusters

Ioannis Mytilinis

As the volume of produced data is exponentially increasing, companies tend to rely on distributed systems to meet the surging demand for storage capacity. With the business workflows becoming more and more complex, such systems often consist of or are acce ...

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2021

Time in cryptography

Gwangbae Choi

Time travel has always been a fascinating topic in literature and physics. In cryptography, one may wonder how to keep data confidential for some time. In this dissertation, we will study how to make private information travel to the future. This dissertat ...

EPFL2020

ICO investors

Rüdiger Fahlenbrach, Marc André Frattaroli

We conduct a detailed analysis of investors in successful initial coin offerings (ICOs). The average ICO has 4700 contributors. The median participant contributes small amounts and many investors sell their tokens before the underlying product is developed ...

2021

Cooperative energy management of a community of smart-buildings: A Blockchain approach

Maher Kayal, Olivier Valentin Henri Van Cutsem

Demand Response (DR) is progressively moving from a centralized, unidirectional structure to a set of advanced decentralized mechanisms that better balance distributed supply and demand. This paper presents a decentralized cooperative DR framework to manag ...

ELSEVIER SCI LTD2020

Essays in Financial Economics

Marc André Frattaroli

This thesis consists of three chapters that study separate subjects in the area of corporate governance and financial intermediation. In the first chapter, I study a protectionist anti-takeover law introduced in 2014 in France that covers a subset of all ...

EPFL2020