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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.


On this site:


Team


Current Projects

Performance and Incentives for Decentralized Systems | Cryptographically Secure Distributed Randomness Generation | Theory and Practice of Scalable Blockchains and Interoperability | Decentralized Private Data Management


Publications

Danezis G, Kokoris Kogias E, Sonnino A, Spiegelman A. 2022. Narwhal and Tusk: A DAG-based mempool and efficient BFT consensus. Proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Computer Systems. EuroSys: European Conference on Computer Systems, 34–50. View

Kokoris Kogias E, Malkhi D, Spiegelman A. 2021. Asynchronous distributed key generation for computationally-secure randomness, consensus, and threshold signatures. Proceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. CCS: Computer and Communications Security, 1751–1767. View

Keidar I, Kokoris Kogias E, Naor O, Spiegelman A. 2021. All You Need is DAG. Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing. PODC: Principles of Distributed Computing, 165–175. View

Gelashvili R, Kokoris Kogias E, Spiegelman A, Xiang Z. 2021. Brief announcement: Be prepared when network goes bad: An asynchronous view-change protocol. Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing. PODC: Principles of Distributed Computing, 187–190. View

Kokoris Kogias E, Alp EC, Gasser L, Jovanovic P, Syta E, Ford B. 2020. CALYPSO: Private data management for decentralized ledgers. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment. 14(4), 586–599. View

View All Publications

ReX-Link: Lefteris Kokoris Kogias


Career

From 09/2021 Assistant Professor, Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA)
2020 – now Research Scientist, Facebook Research/Novi, London, UK
2020 – 2020 Research Scientist, Web3 Foundation, Zug, Switzerland
2019 – 2020 Postdoc, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
2019 – 2019 Visiting Scientist, VMware Research, Palo Alto, CA, USA
2018 – 2018 Intern, IBM Research Zurich, Switzerland
2015 – 2019 PhD, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
2015 MEng, National Technical University of Athens, Greece


Selected Distinctions

2018 IBM PhD Fellowship
2017 IBM PhD Fellowship
2015 EDIC PhD Fellow, EPFL
2014 NTUA Thomaidion Award


Additional Information

Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias’ website



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