Decentralized Systems and Network Services Research Group
Under the term "Decentralized Systems and Network Services" we understand distributed and networked technical systems that span over more than one administrative domain. Hence, their operation depends on more than one party. Our research focuses on:
- Blockchains, broadcast and consensus algorithms and smart contracts
- P2P-networks and network monitoring
- Decentralized messaging at the example of Matrix
- Identity Management and Access Control Systems
- Secure and privacy-aware computing in partially trustworthy environments.
News | News Archive
We presented our new publication “Logical Clocks and Monotonicity for Byzantine-Tolerant Replicated Data Types” at this year's Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data. In the paper, we decompose Matrix and other autonomous decentralized systems into their order-theoretic foundations. We show that the decomposition allows to analyze Byzantine fault tolerance on the basis of the order-theoretic property of monotonicity. The article is freely available as open access under CC-BY
At the Bitcoin Research Day in Fall 2024 in New York, Prof. Dr. Hannes Hartenstein and Matthias Grundmann will give a talk about our research. The talk is titled "From Monitoring Bitcoin to Verifying Lightning: Modeling Aspects of the Bitcoin Universe". Find more information at brd.chaincode.com.
For our SACMAT poster, there is now a follow-up extended version on arXiv under the subtitle “A Case for Neuro-Symbolic AI in Constrained Task Planning for Humanoid Assistive Robots”. We report on new experiments with the unification of robot task planning and access control via Large Language Models, and show how different levels of neuro-symbolic integration can further strengthen this unification.
At the 37th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC'23), October 9-13, 2023, in L'Aquila, Italy, we presented our work Let It TEE. We showed that the consensus algorithm DAG-Rider can be transformed using Trusted Execution Environments, such as Intel SGX, such that up to 49% of protocol participants can be malicious while progress can still be made.