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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

Beaver D, Kelkar M, Lewi K, Nikolaenko V, Sonnino A, Chalkias K, Kokoris Kogias E, Naurois LD, Roy A. 2023. STROBE: Streaming Threshold Random Beacons. 5th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies. AFT: Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies, LIPIcs, vol. 282, 7. View

Das S, Xiang Z, Kokoris Kogias E, Ren L. 2023. Practical asynchronous high-threshold distributed key generation and distributed polynomial sampling. 32nd USENIX Security Symposium. USENIX Security Symposium vol. 8, 5359–5376. View

Neiheiser R, Inacio G, Rech L, Montez C, Matos M, Rodrigues L. 2023. Practical limitations of Ethereum’s layer-2. IEEE Access. 11, 8651–8662. View

De la Rocha A, Kokoris Kogias E, Soares JM, Vukolic M. 2022. Hierarchical consensus: A horizontal scaling framework for blockchains. 42nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops. ICDCSW: International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshop vol. 2022, 45–52. View

Spiegelman A, Giridharan N, Sonnino A, Kokoris Kogias E. 2022. Bullshark: DAG BFT protocols made practical. Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. CCS: CConference on Computer and Communications Security, 2705–2718. 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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