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
- Decentralized Learning.
News | News Archive
Our paper “Why Ethereum Needs Fairness Mechanisms that Do Not Depend on Participants’ Altruism” received the Best Paper Award at the 8th Conference on Blockchain Research & Applications for Innovative Networks and Services (BRAINS 2026)!
In our paper, we show that at most 1.55% of Ethereum proposer have no connection to external, profit-maximizing entities. This suggests, in particular, that fairness mechanisms relying on Buterin’s assumption of altruistic behavior may fail to achieve their intended outcomes.
On June 29, 2026, Matthias Grundmann successfully defended his dissertation entitled “Security Aspects of Payment Channel Networks”. In his dissertation, he describes an approach for formally verifying the security of the Lightning Network, presents methods and results from measurements of Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer network, and develops new ways to secure payment channels. Congratulations!
During this year's Workshop on Principles and Practice for Consistency of Distributed Data, we have presented our talk “Towards System-Oriented Formal Verification of Local-First Access Control”. In this work, we apply the Verus Framework for formal specification and verification in Rust on decentralized access control systems. The corresponding article is open access.
Our paper "Security of the Lightning Network: Model Checking a Stepwise Refinement with TLA+" received the best paper award at the 20th International Conference on Integrated Formal Methods (iFM 2025). In this contribution, we present our method and result of a security analysis of Lightning, the protocol of the Lightning Network.