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 have presented our new publication “Proof-Carrying CRDTs allow Succinct Non-Interactive Byzantine Update Validation” on this year's Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data. In this work, Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) are combined first-time with non-interactive cryptographic proofs, as they are known from the zero-knowledge field. The article is freely available as Open Acces under CC-BY.
The ROBUST Workshop on Byzantine Fault Tolerance und State Machine Replication takes place with us at KIT in Karlsruhe this year. This workshop aims to bring together leading minds in our field to explore and discuss current and preliminary work with open questions in substantial depth. The event on March 17 and 18, 2025 is planned from lunch to lunch so that there is time to arrive and depart on the same days. The Call for Contributions as well as additional information is found on: ROBUST 2025
Florian Jacob, a member of our research group, was a guest on the latest episode of the Matrix Salon podcast, where he talked about his research on the security and resilience of the Matrix network and his life as a Ph.D. student.
At this year's Bitcoin Research Day, Hannes Hartenstein and Matthias Grundmann gave a talk titled "From Monitoring Bitcoin to Verifying Lightning: Modeling Aspects of the Bitcoin Universe". In particular, they presented our research on monitoring the P2P network of Bitcoin and on verification of the Lightning Network's protocol and discussed it with the participants.