Research profile

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. The current focus of our group is 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.

We have has also contributed research for many years in the fields of mobility (connected vehicles, "Car-to-X Communication"), decentral energy systems, and federative identity managment.

Our group designs and analyses techniques with the particular focus on security, performance, and deployability:

  • Security: explicit modelling of trust and "tunable security"
  • Performance: performance evaluation through discrete event modelling and simulation
  • Deployability: deployability is part of the requirement and evaluation
Current Publications
Title Author Source

37th International Symposium on Distributed Computing, DISC 2023, October 10-12, 2023, L'Aquila, Italy. doi:10.4230/LIPICS.DISC.2023.43

Proceedings of the 28th ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies. Ed.: Silvio Ranise, 2023, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). doi:10.1145/3589608.3595078

Dissertation, Karlsruhe, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT), 2023. doi:10.5445/IR/1000159237

PaPoC ’23: 10th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data Rome Italy 8 May 2023. Ed.: E. Gonzalez Boix, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). doi:10.1145/3578358.3591333

Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2022 (FC'22)

Research areas

Security and Anonymity of Blockchain Networks

  • Monitoring and experiments in the Bitcoin p2p network: dsn.tm.kit.edu/bitcoin
  • Development of simulation models for simulation of the Bitcoin p2p network
  • Evaluation of security and performance

Crypto Currencies and Consensus

  • Global consensus
  • Payment channels and other off-chain techniques
  • Game theoretic constructions for security

Modelling of Decentralized Trust

  • Trusted execution environments
  • Identity and key management
  • Privacy and data protection

Network Security Monitoring

  • Deployability
  • Evaluation of performance
  • Threat intelligence management

Simulation and Methods for Simulation

  • Development of complex models for simulation
  • Analysis of models for simulation
  • Simulation methods and optimization

Funded Research Projects

As a research group, we are and were involved in several projects on research, standardisation, and integration. Listed below is an overview of current and finished projects that we are or were a part of.

Finished Projects
Title Contact

Jérôme Härri