Kokoris Group

Secure, Private, and Decentralized Systems (SPiDerS)

In the last decades, computing enabled society to interconnect transcending the physical limits of its distributed nature. Trust is often sacrificed in the name of efficiency and speed that our era impatiently demands. Speed, however, is the enemy of trust as building trust requires friction and time. Several traditional trust-oriented institutions that ought to prioritize security and privacy over efficiency, such as banks, media, and governments, are called to adapt to this ongoing digital revolution. Our fast and interconnected digital world brings great challenges: our systems are left vulnerable to potential adversaries that can exploit the security weaknesses introduced to cope with the ferocious demand for speed.

The SPiDerS group sheds light on the benefits and shortcomings of this latest explosion of interest in the decentralized trust technologies. The group focuses on Byzantine Fault Tolerant systems and algorithms, where various interesting research questions have emerged: How can the current financial ecosystem integrate scalable decentralized systems? How can we scavenge randomness from multiple semi-trustworthy players to run publicly-verifiable lotteries or audit elections? The driving force and inspiration of the group’s research focus stems from both the technical challenges presented in existing systems, as well as the socio-technical barriers faced by conventional institutions. The SPiDerS group aspires to contribute to this rapidly-evolving digital world by designing and building secure scalable decentralized systems with real-world impact.