Decentralized Systems Lab

The Decentralized Systems Lab roster is full.

We are no longer taking new students.

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

Bolton Bailey graduates with PhD!
Yunqi Li graduates with PhD!
Tom Yurek graduates with PhD!
SGXonerated paper released (preprint)
Andrew’s panel discussions on TEEs. (mev privacy roast) (Blockchains+TEEs)
SGX.fail paper presented at RWC (sgx.fail website) (preprint)
Bolton presents SNARK formalization at SBC 2022. (eprint) (video)
2nd Place award at the 2022 IC3 blockchain camp hackathon (post).
Honey Badger Swap (ic3 post)
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)

MOOC about DeFi [https://defi-learning.org/]
Measurement in Lightning (preprint)
Fake Stake attacks on chain based Proof-of-Stake currencies [paper] [Github] (Blog in English, Russian translation, Chinese translation)
New MOOC about Smart Contract Security [videos]
Previous courses
Member of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3)

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.

Development of Asynchronous MPC Protocols and Components (hbACSS, hbDPSS)
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:

Adj. Assoc. Prof. Andrew Miller

Students:

Surya Bakshi (Ph.D., ECE) [master thesis]
Nerla Jean-Louis (Ph.D., CS)
Amit Agarwal (Ph.D., CS)
Harjasleen Malvai (Ph.D., CS)

Visiting Researchers:

Sylvain Bellemare (IC3 Staff Engineer)

Bolton Bailey (Ph.D., CS) Now at Pi2
Yunqi Li (Ph.D., ECE) Now at Meta Research
Tom Yurek (Ph.D., CS) Now at Meta Research
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
Mikerah Quintyne-Collins (visitor) HashCloack
Jun-You Liu (visitor) Cornell
Ye Zhang (visitor) Scroll
Kyle Soska (post-doc) CMU

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