Decentralized Systems Lab

Our mission is to build resilient public infrastructure for the world’s data.

The theme of our work is decentralization: Inspired by peer-to-peer networks and cryptocurrencies, we build distributed systems for broad applications, that resist attacks while minimizing their reliance on trusted external parties. Our approach is multidisciplinary, combining methods from distributed computing, cryptography, programming languages, network measurement, and mechanism design. You can find some of our photos here.

News

Jun-you and Surya’s blog post on Universal Composability and Payment Channels posted on IC3’s medium page
Tom’s preprint on hbACSS hit the nearest eprint server near you
Bolton presented paper at WTSC’21 on more efficient stateless clients (pdf) (youtube)
Sanket co-oauthored paper on empirical measurement of the Lightning network appearing at Financial Cryptography ’21 (pdf)
We are having a weekly ZK-SNARK reading group! (schedule)
5th annual IC3 blockchain Camp held virtually.
Professor Andrew Miller has been awarded an NSF CAREER Award to continue development of SaUCy and sharded MPC.

We support and learn from cutting-edge cryptocurrencies (like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, and more)

Deploying system chaincodes on Hyperledger Fabric [blog]
Fake Stake attacks on chain based Proof-of-Stake currencies [paper] [Github] (Blog in English, Russian translation, Chinese translation)
Cryptocurrency Network Measurement
New MOOC about Smart Contract Security [videos]
Previous courses
Member of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3)
Smart contract security – (Video: Ethereum isn’t Turing Complete and it doesn’t matter anyway) [Ethereum Lab] [Blog posts on hackingdistributed]
Allofthecoins – docker infrastructure for running cryptocurrencies in sandboxes [github]
Shadow Bitcoin – simulation framework for cryptocurrency networks [github] [paper]

We create Blockchain technology. Many industries, including finance, healthcare, and more, would benefit from more automation and more information sharing, but security concerns remain an obstacle. The “Blockchain” movement is an industry-wide effort to solve this problem by building new platforms for shared data, with security designed-in from the start. We contribute by making fundamental advances that combine techniques from fault-tolerant and dependable/reliable systems, cryptography, and programming languages.

CanDID: Decentralized Identity Realization
Sharded MPC: Scalable Privacy-preserving Computing Platform
SaUCy and ILC: Programming language for composable cryptography
HoneyBadgerMPC: Confidentiality for Consortium Blockchains
HoneyBadgerBFT: an improved fault tolerant consensus protocol
Off-chain Smart Contracts: Sprites and PISA (https://www.pisa.watch/)

Faculty:

Asst. Prof. Andrew Miller

Students:

Surya Bakshi (Ph.D., ECE) [master thesis]
Tom Yurek (Ph.D., CS)
Yunqi Li (Ph.D., ECE)
Nerla Jean-Louis (Ph.D., CS)
Amit Agarwal (Ph.D., CS)
Bolton Bailey (Ph.D., CS)
Harjasleen Malvai (Ph.D., CS)

Post-doctorate:

Kyle Soska

Visiting Researchers:

Mikerah Quintyne-Collins (HashCloack)
Jun-You Liu (Cornell)
Sylvain Bellemare (IC3 Staff Engineer)
Harjasleen Malvai (Cornell, now Ph.D. student)

Sanket Kanjalkar (Masters, CS) Now at Blockstream [thesis]
Shreyas Gandlur (Undergrad, ECE) Now a Ph.D. student at Princeton [thesis]
Kevin Liao (Masters, CS) Now a Ph.D. student at MIT [thesis]
Rahul Mahadev (Masters, CS) Now at Databricks [thesis]
Samarth Kulshreshtha (Masters, CS) Now at Google [thesis]
Xiaoyao Qian (Masters, CS) Now at Twitter [thesis]
Chris Cordi (Masters, CS) Now at Sandia [thesis]
Drake Eidukas (Undergrad, CS) Now at Citadel
Kevin Lee (Undergrad, ECE) Now a Ph.D. student at Princeton
Abhiram Kothapalli (Undergrad, CS) Now a Ph.D. student at CMU
Sergi Delgado Segura (visitor) PISA research
Patrick McCorry (visitor) PISA research
Jaiden Fairoze (visitor) Now a Ph.D. student at Berkeley

Decentralized Systems Lab is part of Security and Privacy Research @ Illinois (SPR@I).