CSRG

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Concurrent Systems Research Group,
University of Sydney
1, Cleveland St.,
NSW 2006 Sydney
csrg.sydney@gmail.com

Projects

Reducing Blockchain Bottlenecks

The number of cryptographic verifications used in blockchains leads to performance bottlenecks. By reducing the number of verifications needed in the blockchain protocols, either by sharding the verification or by reducing the propagation of transactions in the network, is key to accelerate the processing of transactions.

Decentralized Governance

A recent area of research is computational social choice that lies at the border of computer science and social choice theory. As election protocols are often designed assuming synchrony, it makes it hard to adapt them to an open network like the Internet where delays can be due to network congestion, misconfiguration or natural disasters. This projects aims at designing protocols that tolerate delays and malicious participants to cope with the elect a decentralized governance in a fair manner.

Consensus Accountability

Accountability is missing from classic blockchains as the user that manages to double spends usually go undetected. This project aims at building an undeniable proof-of-fraud identifying a node that has attempted a double spending attack. The key idea is to require that the key messages that can influence the block decision to be cryptographically signed by their senders. The proof-of-fraud is derived from the combination of conflicting messages.

Ordered Consensus

To avoid the reordering of transactions in blockchain systems that allows hackers to front-run other users, it is important to impose an ordering on the transactions being committed in the blockchain. This project consists of minimizing the time it takes to order transactions to avoid slowing down significantly the system.