Executive Summary – Overview
A blockchain is an immutable distributed ledger for storing and processing transactions. Our team has been designing and implementing efficient and intrusion-tolerant blockchain consensus (BFT) protocols that are being used in practice. We will continue building novel systems advancing the state-of-the-art BFT/blockchain systems.
Technical Challenge/Activities
The development of distributed systems requires expertise in applied cryptography, distributed systems, and security, and requires collaboration from people in various domains. From the technical perspective, we aim to improve the state-of-the-art BFT/blockchain protocols in terms of latency, throughput, bandwidth, scalability, robustness, etc., but we are also interested in building practically useful and novel applications (IoT, storage, supply chains, health exchange).
Impact
The team has designed a number of BFT/blockchain systems that are used by academia and industry, including BChain, a highly efficient BFT protocol implemented within Hyperledger blockchain framework and featured in Hyperledger white paper, ByzID (SRDS 14, BFT with trusted components), CBFT (SRDS 16, BFT with confidentiality), causal BFT (DSN 17, BFT with causality), and recently BEAT (CCS 18, asynchronous BFT made practical).
Project Members
Assistant Professors – Sisi Duan, Haibin Zhang
Students – Xin Wang, James Clavin, Cyrus Jian Bonyadi, Shuai Xu, Chao Liu