Distributed Systems | Protocol Labs Research
Publications
[View all PL Research publications
2024-02-01/Report
A finality calculator for Filecoin’s Expected Consensus
We propose a finality calculator for Filecoin’s Expected consensus that considers what takes place during epochs and can attain, under normal operating conditions, an error probability of 2^(−30) in 30 epochs (15 minutes) - a 30x improvement over the current 900-epoch threshold.
2023-08-14/Conference paper
Security analysis of Filecoin's Expected Consensus in the Byzantine vs honest model
Filecoin is the largest storage-based open-source blockchain, both by storage capacity (>11EiB) and market capitalization. This paper provides the first formal security analysis of Filecoin’s consensus (ordering) protocol, Expected Consensus (EC).
AFT 2023 / 2023.10.23 / Princeton, NJ, USA
Xuechao Wang, Sarah Azouvi, Marko Vukolić
2023-04-22/Conference paper
Base fee manipulation in Ethereum's EIP-1559 transaction fee mechanism
In 2021 Ethereum adjusted the transaction pricing mechanism by implementing EIP-1559, which introduces the base fee - a fixed network fee per block that is burned and adjusted dynamically in accordance with network demand.
DISC 2023 / 2023.10.09 / L'Aquila, Italy
Sarah Azouvi, Guy Goren, Lioba Heimbach, Alexander Hicks
2023-01-10/White paper
Existing funding systems fail to sufficiently fund public goods and common goods due to insufficient mechanisms for coordinating various agents towards valuable outcomes. Relative to traditional capital systems that scalably organize activity around maximizing financial performance, impact funding remains underdeveloped, especially in the ability to reward high-upside, high-uncertainty work.
Distributed systems, Networking
2022-12-13/Conference paper
Enriching Kademlia by partitioning
Decentralizing the Web is becoming an increasingly interesting endeavor that aims at improving user security and privacy as well as providing guaranteed ownership of content. One such endeavor that pushes towards this reality, is Protocol Labs’ Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) network, that provides a decentralized large scale file system to support the decentralized Web.
DINPS 22 / 2022.07.10 / Bologna, Italy
João Monteiro, Pedro Ákos Costa, João Leitão, Alfonso de la Rocha, Yiannis Psaras
Distributed systems, Networking
2022-12-13/Conference paper
Blockchain systems based on a reusable resource, such as proof-of-stake (PoS), provide weaker security guarantees than those based on proof-of-work. Specifically, they are vulnerable to long-range attacks, where an adversary can corrupt prior participants in order to rewrite the full history of the chain.
ConsensusDay 22 / 2022.11.07 / Los Angeles, CA, USA
2022-11-07/Journal article
When the COVID-19 pandemic erupted in early 2020, the world made an unprecedented shift to remote work. As a precaution, some Internet providers scaled back service levels temporarily, although that probably wasn’t necessary for countries in Asia, Europe, and North America, which were generally able to cope with the surge in demand caused by people teleworking (and binge-watching Netflix).
IEEE Spectrum / 2022.11.07
Yiannis Psaras, Jorge M. Soares, David Dias
Distributed systems, Networking
2022-10-24/Journal article
Mir-BFT: Scalable and robust BFT for decentralized networks
This paper presents Mir-BFT, a robust Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) total order broadcast protocol aimed at maximizing throughput on wide-area networks (WANs), targeting deployments in decentralized networks, such as permissioned and Proof-of-Stake permissionless blockchain systems.
Journal of Systems Research / 2022.10.24
Chrysoula Stathakopoulou, David Tudor, Matej Pavlovic, Marko Vukolić
2022-09-28/Conference paper
We present a decentralized hole punching mechanism built into the peer-to-peer networking library libp2p. Hole punching is crucial for peer-to-peer networks, enabling each participant to directly communicate to any other participant, despite being separated by firewalls and NATs.
DINPS 2022 / 2022.07.10 / Bologna, Italy
Marten Seemann, Max Inden, Dimitris Vyzovitis
Distributed systems, Networking
2022-07-26/Conference paper
Design and evaluation of IPFS: A storage layer for the decentralized web
Recent years have witnessed growing consolidation of web operations. For example, the majority of web traffic now originates from a few organizations, and even micro-websites often choose to host on large pre-existing cloud infrastructures.
ACM SIGCOMM 2022 / 2022.08.26 / Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Dennis Trautwein, Aravindh Raman, Gareth Tyson, Ignacio Castro, Will Scott, Moritz Schubotz, Bela Gipp, Yiannis Psaras
Distributed systems, Networking
2022-04-20/Conference paper
State machine replication scalability made simple
Consensus, state machine replication (SMR) and total order broadcast (TOB) protocols are notorious for being poorly scalable with the number of participating nodes. Despite the recent race to reduce overall message complexity of leader-driven SMR/TOB protocols, scalability remains poor and the throughput is typically inversely proportional to the number of nodes.
EuroSys '22: Seventeenth European Conference on Computer Systems / 2022.04.06 / Rennes, France
Chrysoula Stathakopoulou, Matej Pavlovic, Marko Vukolić
2022-04-08/Report
We revisit the notion of Witness Authenticated Key Exchange (WAKE) where a party can be authenticated through a generic witness to an NP statement. We point out shortcomings of previous definitions, protocols and security proofs in Ngo et al.
Matteo Campanelli, Rosario Gennaro, Kelsey Melissaris, Luca Nizzardo
Cryptography, Distributed systems
2022-03-11/Conference paper
Hierarchical consensus: A horizontal scaling framework for blockchains
We present the Filecoin Hierarchical Consensus framework, which aims to overcome the throughput challenges of blockchain consensus by horizontally scaling the network. Unlike traditional sharding designs, based on partitioning the state of the network, our solution centers on the concept of subnets –which are organized hierarchically– and can be spawned on-demand to manage new state.
DINPS 22 / 2022.07.10 / Bologna, Italy
Alfonso de la Rocha, Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias, Jorge M. Soares, Marko Vukolić
2022-01-26/Conference paper
Decentralisation conscious players and system reliability
We propose a game-theoretic model of the reliability of de- centralised systems based on Varian’s model of system reliability [27], to which we add a new normalized total effort case that models decentrali- sation conscious players that prioritize decentralisation.
Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2022 / 2022.05.02 / St. George's, Grenada
Sarah Azouvi, Alexander Hicks
2022-01-24/Conference paper
Sliding window challenge process for congestion detection
Many prominent smart contract applications such as payment channels, auctions, and voting systems often involve a mechanism in which some party must respond to a challenge or appeal some action within a fixed time limit.
Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2022 / 2022.05.02 / St. George’s, Grenada
Ayelet Lotem, Sarah Azouvi, Aviv Zohar, Patrick McCorry
2021-11-23/Journal article
On the future of decentralized computing
Decentralized systems (e.g., blockchain systems) have the potential to revolutionize financial and payment systems, as well as the internet — for the good of humankind and planet Earth. This position paper aims at justifying this standpoint and at laying out a vision for the future of decentralized computing.
Bulletin of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science / 2021.11.23
2021-11-16/Conference paper
Private attacks in longest chain proof-of-stake protocols with single secret leader elections
Single Secret Leader Elections have recently been proposed as an improved leader election mechanism for proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains. However, the security gain they provide has not been quantified. In this work, we present a comparison of PoS longest-chain protocols that are based on Single Secret Leader Elections (SSLE) - that elect exactly one leader per round - versus those based on Probabilistic Leader Elections (PLE) - where one leader is elected on expectation.
AFT '21: 3rd ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies / 2021.09.28
Sarah Azouvi, Daniele Cappelletti
2021-06-21/Conference paper
Pulsarcast: Scalable, reliable pub-sub over P2P nets
The publish-subscribe paradigm is a wildly popular form of communication in complex distributed systems. The properties offered by it make it an ideal solution for a multitude of applications, ranging from social media to content streaming and stock exchange platforms.
DI2F / 2021.06.21 / Espoo, Finland
Joao Antunes, David Dias, Luis Veiga
Distributed systems, Networking
2021-06-21/Conference paper
The case for AI based Web3 reputation systems
Initiatives such as blockchains and decentralized storage networks are pushing for a decentralized Web3 to replace the current architecture. At the core of Web3 are network resource sharing services, which allow anyone to sell spare network capacity in return for rewards.
DI2F / 2021.06.21 / Espoo, Finland
Navin V. Keizer, Fan Yang, Yiannis Psaras, George Pavlou
Distributed systems, Networking
2021-06-11/Conference paper
IPFS-FAN: A function-addressable computation network
Permissionless computation is one of the missing pieces in the web3 stack in order to have all the tools needed to “decentralise Internet services”. There are already proposals to embed computation in decentralised networks like smart contracts, or blockchain networks for computational offloading.
DI2F / 2021.06.21 / Espoo, Finland
Alfonso de la Rocha, Yiannis Psaras, David Dias
Networking, Distributed systems
2021-01-14/Report
Accelerating content routing with Bitswap: A multi-path file transfer protocol in IPFS and Filecoin
Bitswap is a Block Exchange protocol designed for P2P Content Addressable Networks. It leverages merkle-linked graphs in order to parallelize retrieval and verify content integrity. Bitswap is being used in the InterPlanetary File System architecture as the main content exchange protocol, as well as in the Filecoin network as part of the block synchronisation protocol.
Alfonso de la Rocha, David Dias, Yiannis Psaras
Distributed systems, Networking
2020-12-07/Conference paper
PASTRAMI: Privacy-preserving, auditable, scalable & trustworthy auctions for multiple items
Decentralised cloud computing platforms enable individuals to offer and rent resources in a peer-to-peer fashion. They must assign resources from multiple sellers to multiple buyers and derive prices that match the interests and capacities of both parties.
Middleware '20 / 2020.12.07
Michał Król, Alberto Sonnino, Argyrios Tasiopoulos, Yiannis Psaras, Etienne Rivière
Distributed systems, Networking
2020-12-05/Report
Vector commitments with subvector openings (SVC) [Lai-Malavolta, Boneh-Bunz-Fisch; CRYPTO’19] allow one to open a committed vector at a set of positions with an opening of size independent of both the vector’s length and the number of opened positions.
Advances in Cryptology – ASIACRYPT 2020 / 2020.12.05
Matteo Campanelli, Dario Fiore, Nicola Greco, Dimitris Kolonelos, Luca Nizzardo
Cryptography, Distributed systems
2020-10-11/Conference paper
Rewarding relays for decentralised NAT traversal using smart contracts
Traversing NAT’s remains a big issue in P2P networks, and many of the previously proposed solutions are incompatible with truly decentralised emerging applications. Such applications need a decentralised NAT traversal solution without trusted centralised servers.
Mobihoc '20 / 2020.10.11
Navin V. Keizer, Onur Ascigil, Yiannis Psaras, George Pavlou
Distributed systems, Networking
2020-07-06/Report
GossipSub: Attack-resilient message propagation in the Filecoin and ETH2.0 networks
Permissionless blockchain environments necessitate the use of a fast and attack-resilient message propagation protocol for Block and Transaction messages to keep nodes synchronised and avoid forks. We present GossipSub, a gossip-based pubsub protocol, which, in contrast to past pubsub protocols, incorporates resilience against a wide spectrum of attacks.
Dimitris Vyzovitis, Yusef Napora, Dirk McCormick, David Dias, Yiannis Psaras
Distributed systems, Networking
2020-04-27/
Merkle-CRDTs: Merkle-DAGs meet CRDTs
We study Merkle-DAGs as a transport and persistence layer for Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs), coining the term Merkle-CRDTs and providing an overview of the different concepts, properties, advantages and limitations involved.
Hector Sanjuan, Samuli Poyhtari, Pedro Teixeira, Yiannis Psaras
Distributed systems, Networking
2020-04-18/Report
Gossipsub-v1.1 evaluation report
Distributed systems, Networking
2020-03-30/Conference paper
Censorship-resistant web annotations based on Ethereum and IPFS
Flooded by the propagation of false or biased news in the Web, people tend to resort to social networks to read posts from reliable sources, exchange commentaries with trustworthy parties, access first-hand content, or cross-check information that appears in news outlets.
SAC 2020 / 2020.03.30 / Brno, Czech Republic
João Santos, Nuno Santos, David Dias
2018-10-15/Report
Scaling proof-of-replication for Filecoin mining
A proof-of-replication (PoRep) is a proof system that a server can use to demonstrate to a network in a publicly verifiable way that it is dedicating unique resources to storing one or more replicas of a data file.
Ben Fisch, Joseph Bonneau, Nicola Greco, Juan Benet
Cryptography, Distributed systems
2018-07-14/Report
PoReps: Proofs of space on useful data
A proof-of-replication (PoRep) is an interactive proof system in which a prover defends a publicly verifiable claim that it is dedicating unique resources to storing one or more retrievable replicas of a data file.
Cryptography, Distributed systems
2017-07-27/Report
Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) accounts for faults as the number of faulty nodes and is thus cumbersome to apply to many modern decentralized systems. We introduce the Power Fault Tolerance (PFT) model, which reframes BFT in terms of participants’ influence over the outcome of a protocol, instead of the number of nodes.
Protocol Labs
Cryptography, Distributed systems
2017-07-27/Report
We introduce Proof-of-Replication (PoRep), a new kind of Proof-of-Storage, that can be used to prove that some data D has been replicated to its own uniquely dedicated physical storage. Enforcing unique physical copies enables a verifier to check that a prover is not deduplicating multiple copies of D into the same storage space.
Juan Benet, David Dalrymple, Nicola Greco
Cryptography, Distributed systems
2017-07-19/Report
Filecoin: A decentralized storage network
The internet is in the middle of a revolution: centralized proprietary services are being replaced with decentralized open ones; trusted parties replaced with verifiable computation; brittle location addresses replaced with resilient content addresses; inefficient monolithic services replaced with peer-to-peer algo-rithmic markets.
Protocol Labs
Cryptography, Distributed systems
2016-05-25/Tutorial
Distributed web applications with IPFS
The contents of this document describe the tutorial session delivered at ICWE 2016, focused on Building Distributed Web Applications with IPFS. IPFS, the InterPlanetary File System, is the distributed and permanent Web, a protocol to make the Web faster, more secure and open.
16th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE) / 2016.05.25 / Lugano, Switzerland
2014-07-15/Report
Filecoin: A cryptocurrency operated file storage network
Filecoin is a distributed electronic currency similar to Bitcoin. Unlike Bitcoin’s computation-only proof-of-work, Filecoin’s proof-of-work function includes a proof-of-retrievability component, which requires nodes to prove they store a particular file. The Filecoin network forms an entirely distributed file storage system, whose nodes are incentivized to store as much of the entire network’s data as they can.
Protocol Labs
Cryptography, Distributed systems
2014-07-14/Report
IPFS - Content addressed, versioned, P2P file system
The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a peer-to-peer distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files. In some ways, IPFS is similar to the Web, but IPFS could be seen as a single BitTorrent swarm, exchanging objects within one Git repository.
Talks
[View all PL Research talks
2024-02-27
F3 and GossipBFT: Fast finality on longest-chain protocols
ETHDenver 2024 / 2024.02.27 / Denver, CO, USA
2023-07-17
Protocol Labs Research Talks / 2023.07.17
2023-03-30
Scalable asynchronous randomized byzantine agreement
Randomness Summit 2023 / 2023.03.30 / Tokyo, Japan
Henrique Moniz, Matej Pavlovic
2023-03-29
tlock: Practical timelock encryption based on threshold BLS
Real World Crypto 23 / 2023.03.29 / Tokyo, Japan
2022-11-21
Applications of Interplanetary Consensus
ConsensusLab Summit / 2022.10.27 / Lisbon, Portugal
2022-11-21
Blockchain meets concurrency: Scaling FVM with multi-threaded execution
ConsensusLab Summit / 2022.10.27 / Lisbon, Portugal
2022-11-21
Building modular and scalable BFT consensus using the Mir framework
ConsensusLab Summit / 2022.10.27 / Lisbon, Portugal
2022-11-21
ConsensusLab Summit / 2022.10.27 / Lisbon, Portugal
2022-11-21
Interplanetary Consensus: Now playing in Eudico near you
ConsensusLab Summit / 2022.10.27 / Lisbon, Portugal
2022-11-21
Interplanetary Consensus: Scaling blockchains with subnets in an easy-to-trust model
ConsensusLab Summit / 2022.10.27 / Lisbon, Portugal
2022-11-21
Realising web3: 15 months of ConsensusLab
ConsensusLab Summit / 2022.10.27 / Lisbon, Portugal
2022-11-21
Unexpected consensus? The possible futures of the Filecoin network
ConsensusLab Summit / 2022.10.27 / Lisbon, Portugal
2022-09-14
Timelock encryption based on drand
Protocol Labs Research Talks / 2022.09.14
2022-08-11
A dead man’s full-yet-responsible-disclosure system
DEFCON 30 / 2022.08.11 / Las Vegas, NV, USA
2022-07-25
drand: Publicly verifiable randomness explained
May Contain Hackers 2022 / 2022.07.25 / Zeewolde, The Netherlands
2022-07-21
Private access to decentralized data
EthCC 5 / 2022.07.20 / Paris, France
2022-06-24
Hierarchical consensus: A horizontal scaling framework for blockchains
ConsensusFactory / 2022.06.22
2022-03-11
Bitcoin checkpointing project update
ConsensusLab 22Q2 Team Week / 2022.02.07 / Dubai, UAE
2022-03-11
Hierarchical consensus project update
ConsensusLab 22Q2 Team Week / 2022.02.07 / Dubai, UAE
2022-03-11
Parallel execution project update
ConsensusLab 22Q2 Team Week / 2022.02.07 / Dubai, UAE
2022-03-11
Tendermint subnet consensus project update
ConsensusLab 22Q2 Team Week / 2022.02.07 / Dubai, UAE
2022-02-23
Filecoin hierarchical consensus
Protocol Labs Research Talks / 2022.02.03
2021-12-14
A vision for ConsensusLab and decentralized computing
ConsensusDays 21 / 2021.10.07
2021-12-14
ConsensusDays 21 / 2021.10.08
2021-12-14
The importance of consensus R&D breakthroughs
ConsensusDays 21 / 2021.10.08
2021-08-02
IPFS-FAN: A function addressible computation network
DI2F / 2021.06.21 / Espoo, Finland
Distributed systems, Networking
2021-02-23
Protocol Labs Research Talks / 2021.02.23
Distributed systems, Networking
2020-03-04
Drand: Distributed, bias resistant, unpredictable and publicly verifiable randomness
Protocol Labs Research Talks / 2020.03.04
2019-02-02
ConsensusDay 1 / 2019.02.02 / Stanford, CA, USA
2019-02-02
ConsensusDay 1 / 2019.02.02 / Stanford, CA, USA
2019-02-02
ConsensusDay 1 / 2019.02.02 / Stanford, CA, USA
2019-02-02
ConsensusDay 1 / 2019.02.02 / Stanford, CA, USA
2019-02-02
ConsensusDay 1 / 2019.02.02 / Stanford, CA, USA
Cryptography, Distributed systems
2018-10-23
IPLD research and future directions
Lab Day 2018 / 2018.10.23 / San Francisco, CA, USA
Distributed systems, Type theory
2018-10-23
PoReps: Proof of space on real data
Lab Day 2018 / 2018.10.23 / San Francisco, CA, USA
Cryptography, Distributed systems
2018-02-03
VDF Day / 2018.02.03 / Stanford, CA, USA
Cryptography, Distributed systems
2018-01-26
Proof of replication using depth robust graphs
BPASE 18 / 2018.01.26 / Stanford, CA, USA
Cryptography, Distributed systems
Blog
[View all PL Research posts
ConsensusDays 23 recordings now available
ConsensusDays 23 took place 5-6 June and we have another successful edition to celebrate! Beyond the exciting programme, here are a few stats from this year: 22 talks 35 submissions 231 registrations 347 members of the #consensus channel 612 members of the ConsensusDays mailing list 614 YouTube views of the raw streams Today, we bring you the final news of the year: the edited talks are now available on YouTube.
Jorge M. Soares, Marko Vukolić
2023-06-13/Blog
Private retrieval grant 2023 roundup
We have concluded the initial round of funding decisions for RFP014, a research initiative in collaboration with Arcological, focused on exploring mechanisms for private data retrieval. The objective of RFP014 is to foster the advancement of private communication methods.
ConsensusDays 23 programme and registration
We’re happy to announce the publication of the ConsensusDays 23 programme. The workshop will take place 5-6 June in the 14:00-18:30 UTC period. We were again overwhelmed by the community interest, and many decisions ended up coming down to program limitations and session planning rather than quality alone.
Jorge M. Soares, Marko Vukolić
2023-04-20/News
IPC subnets land on Filecoin Spacenet
The Interplanetary Consensus framework (IPC), formerly known as Hierarchical Consensus, addresses two challenges of blockchain networks, transaction volume and application heterogeneity. In doing so, it boosts the capabilities of the Filecoin network.
James Bluett, Alfonso de la Rocha, Akosh Farkash, Guy Goren, Denis Kolegov, Willes Lau, Henrique Moniz, Matej Pavlovic, Alejandro Ranchal-Pedrosa, Jorge M. Soares, Marko Vukolić
ConsensusDay 23: deadline extended to 19 Mar
We have already received a number of excellent submissions for ConsensusDay 23 but have decided to extend the submission deadline in order to accommodate several pending contributions. We will therefore be accepting submissions until the end of Sunday, 19 March, anywhere on earth.
Jorge M. Soares, Marko Vukolić
ConsensusDay 23: call for contributions
ConsensusDay is back! We’re returning to our roots and organising a virtual event on 5 June 2023, in a format similar to the 2021 edition. That means we will not be publishing proceedings this year and therefore welcome both novel contributions and those under review or published elsewhere in the last 12 months.
Jorge M. Soares, Marko Vukolić
2023-01-12/Blog
Generalized Impact Evaluators, A year of experiments and theory
TLDR: Protocol Labs’ Network Funding team is releasing a whitepaper on Impact Evaluators, a funding mechanism designed for nontraditional projects with high uncertainty and high upside. Our goal is to add structure to the ongoing dialogue and share practical implementation advice based on a year of experience.
Network Goods
Distributed systems, Networking
2023-01-10/Blog
Announcing the final award for RFP-011, "Changing the Internet"
PL Research is pleased to announce the final research proposal funded as part of the Changing the Internet Initiative: a project by Maria Apostolaki and Jennifer Rexford of Princeton University’s Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science departments, respectively, to improve the state of the art in routing and edge networking.
Distributed systems, Networking
The Filecoin Spacenet goes live
For all of the past year, our team at ConsensusLab has been hard at work pushing the boundaries of Filecoin scalability and devising a framework for horizontal scaling that allows for the seamless spawning of interoperable subnets, as well as a reference implementation of a consensus algorithm suitable for running said subnets.
Join us in Lisbon for the ConsensusLab Summit
In less than two weeks, the Protocol Labs Network will be meeting in Lisbon, Portugal for LabWeek22, a decentralised conference and a first for us. ConsensusLab will also be present, and we’re organising our own event: the ConsensusLab Summit.
ConsensusDay 22: programme now live!
Consensusday 22 is fast approaching! The workshop, which will be co-located with ACM CCS this year, will take place 7 November in Los Angeles. We have another exciting programme for this edition, comprising 15 talks that cover assumptions, PoS security, leader election, performance, and more.
Jorge M. Soares, Marko Vukolić
2022-08-26/Blog
Protocol Labs research funding recipients 2022
Protocol Labs Research is thrilled to announce the first research funding recipients of 2022! We fund researchers around the world and have given out 11 awards so far this year. These awards include three RFPs, two Summer Research Grants, five Doctoral fellowships, and one Postdoctoral fellowship.
ConsensusLab, CryptoComputeLab, CryptoEconLab, Cryptonet, Network Research, ProbeLab, Research Acceleration
Cryptography, Distributed systems, Metaresearch, Networking
Introducing Cryptonet network grants
Originally founded to drive the creation of Filecoin, Cryptonet set out to create a community of researchers and engineers working on designing, proving, improving the building blocks for crypto-networks to engender new capabilities across the Web 3.
Rosario Gennaro, Jorge M. Soares
Distributed systems, Cryptography
Announcing RFP-014: The one with private retrieval
Can we speak privately? Unfortunately, our current options for private communication are limited, hamstrung by their reliance on a single-trusted-origin data publication model, high latencies, and security vulnerabilities. We think it is possible to design a scalable system that doesn’t sacrifice latency for privacy.
Distributed systems, Networking
2022-07-25/Blog
Announcing the first award for RFP-011, "Changing the Internet"
PL Research is pleased to announce the first research project funded as part of the Changing the Internet Initiative: a project by Scott Shenker of ICSI and UC Berkeley, Arvind Krishnamurthy of the University of Washington, James McCauley of Mount Holyoke College, and Aurojit Panda of NYU to improve acess to Web3 services by creating a better client interface and user experience for accessing Web3 content.
Distributed systems, Networking
The Pikachu RFP: Checkpointing Filecoin onto Bitcoin
Blockchains based on a reusable resource (such as proof-of-stake or proof-of-space) are not as secure as those based on proof-of-work. Specifically, they are vulnerable to long-range attacks (LRA), where an adversary can create a long fork very cheaply.
2022-06-30/Blog
New open problems in private data retrieval
tl;dr: We’d like to develop additional protocol-compatible primitives allowing users to interact privately with Web3 content. Central to the Web3 vision of an open, permissionless, and decentralized internet is the ability of parties to interact directly and privately with each other while retaining ownership of their data.
ConsensusFactory summary and recordings
Last Wednesday, we hosted the first edition of ConsensusFactory: Decentralized Reflections on Consensus, a new virtual event that brought together speakers from different blockchain ecosystems to talk about the scalability strategies each of their projects are pursuing.
ConsensusLab welcomes its 2022 summer fellows!
The ConsensusLab team is excited to welcome our first summer research fellows, who will be joining us at different times throughout the summer to work on some of our core research projects.
Join us on 22 June for ConsensusFactory!
Are you interested in consensus and distributed system scalability? So are we! That’s why we’re organizing ConsensusFactory, a new virtual event that will bring together speakers from different blockchain ecosystems, who will present the scalability approaches they are exploring.
ConsensusDay 22: call for contributions
After a wildly successful 2021 edition, ConsensusDay is back for 2022! The goal remains the same: to provide a forum for the discussion of early-stage but high-impact research with scientific interest and real-world applications and to build a community around it.
Jorge M. Soares, Marko Vukolić
2022-04-20/Blog
The first graduating class of ConsensusLab projects
When ConsensusLab launched last year, we published a roadmap covering our first 18 months. We are still working towards that same roadmap, with minor adjustments over time to accommodate the changing landscape and externalities.
Sarah Azouvi, Alfonso de la Rocha, Denis Kolegov, Jorge M. Soares
2022-03-03/Blog
Scaling blockchains with hierarchical consensus
Scaling blockchains is not an easy task. Less so if one is looking to accommodate not only crypto-native use cases but also Web 2.0-like applications handling significant volumes of data at high throughput (of the kind that you would host with your preferred cloud provider).
2022-02-07/Blog
How do you design a general-purpose global communication network? That is the question facing researchers and inventors hoping to create a new internet.
2022-01-12/News
Call for Papers Announcement: Workshop on Decentralized Internet, Networks, Protocols, and Systems Website: https://research.protocol.ai/sites/dinps/ Submission Deadline: 5 March 2022 In June 2021, we ran a workshop on “Decentralizing the Internet with IPFS and Filecoin” (DI2F) alongside IFIP Networking 2021 to establish a forum for academics, researchers and developers to share their expertise and latest findings on decentralized storage, IPFS, libp2p, and Filecoin.
João Leitão, Yiannis Psaras
Distributed systems, Networking
2021-12-21/Blog
Protocol Labs research funding recipients 2021, part 2
Last week we introduced you to the researchers pursuing key problems in cryptography via RFP-009, RFP-010, and a Nucleation Grant. Now we are excited to share the recipients of research awards intended to fund proposals from PhD candidates, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty through our open grant offerings.
AbstractionLab, Cryptonet, ResNetLab
2021-12-13/Blog
A visualization tool for the IPFS DHT
At the Mobile Multimedia Lab of the Athens University of Economics and Business, we have been working on optimisations for the InterPlanetary File System distributed hash table (IPFS DHT) and, in particular, on Multi-Level DHT support.
Spyros Voulgaris, Yiannis Psaras
Distributed systems, Networking
ConsensusLab welcomes Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias as an external collaborator
We are pleased to welcome Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias as an external collaborator on ConsensusLab projects. Lefteris is an assistant professor at IST Austria, where he leads the Secure, Private, and Decentralized Systems (SPiDerS) group.
Vivien Quéma joins PL Research as an advisor to ConsensusLab
We are happy to announce that Vivien Quéma will be joining PL Research’s ConsensusLab as a research advisor. Vivien is a Professor of Computer Science at Grenoble INP and a member of the LIG laboratory.
ConsensusDays 21 recap and recordings
It was a calm day in early August when we launched a call for contributions for ConsensusDay 21, the launch event for our ConsensusLab. Originally intended to be an intimate, one-day virtual workshop aiming to foster discussion of consensus research and bootstrap a collaboration network, it soon became clear that it was growing beyond our wildest expectations – and certainly beyond what we had planned and were prepared to accommodate.
Karola Kirsanow, Jorge M. Soares, Marko Vukolić
Announcing the ConsensusDays 21 program
After a two-week review marathon, we’re happy to announce the exciting program for ConsensusDays 21. The workshop will take place 6-7 October (next week!) in the 14:00-20:00 UTC period. We were overwhelmed by the number and quality of talk proposals, and many decisions ended up coming down to program limitations and session planning rather than quality alone.
Marko Vukolić, Jorge M. Soares
ConsensusDay becomes ConsensusDays 21
We would like to thank all authors for the overwhelming response to the call for contributions. We are delighted by the quality and number of submissions received, which already required us to expand our review team.
ConsensusDay 21: call for contributions
It was only last week that we announced the launch of ConsensusLab, a new Protocol Labs research group focused on scalable consensus for decentralised systems. Looking to drive more focused research into the topic, we are now inviting you to participate in our first public event, ConsensusDay 21.
2021-07-30/News
ConsensusLab: supercharging our consensus research
We are excited to announce the launch of ConsensusLab, a new research group focused on scalable consensus for decentralised systems and a part of Protocol Labs Research. Consensus — loosely defined as global agreement on the state of a decentralised network across its mutually untrusting participants — has been known to be at the heart of decentralised systems ever since the inception of Nakamoto’s Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus.
Sarah Azouvi, Jorge M. Soares, Marko Vukolić
Decentralising the Internet with IPFS and Filecoin (DI2F) — a report from the trenches
The first edition of the DI2F Workshop, which took place on 21 June 2021 and focused on decentralising the Internet with IPFS and Filecoin, has been a phenomenal success! We received more than 20 submissions, out of which 11 were selected to be presented on the day (scroll down to the three sections at the bottom of this page for the full text).
Yiannis Psaras, Jorge M. Soares
Networking, Distributed systems
2021-06-08
ResNetLab on Tour in Australia
On May 5th, ResNetLab participated in a flagship event involving four major Australian universities — Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), University of New South Wales, Australian National University and Macquarie University — and lots of Web 3.
Alfonso de la Rocha, Yiannis Psaras
Distributed systems, Networking
2021-06-08
ResNetLab presents Beyond Bitswap at Codemotion '21
ResNetLab was delighted to accept an invitation to talk about Bitswap and the outcomes of our Beyond Bitswap project at the Spanish Edition of the Codemotion conference. The invitation was then extended to the English edition of the conference, which took place at the end of May.
Distributed systems, Networking
2021-06-02/Blog
ResNetLab presentations at Devfolio's ETH India 2021 Fellowship
Hot off the heels of ETHDenver, the largest Ethereum community event in North America, the Devfolio team who ran the hackathon platform for the event asked if we’d be interested in doing an IPFS training for another of their programs: the Devfolio Ethereum India Fellowship.
Dietrich Ayala, Alfonso de la Rocha, Yiannis Psaras
Distributed systems, Networking
2021-05-24/News
Call for Participation: DI2F: Decentralizing the Internet with IPFS and Filecoin
The first edition of a research-focused workshop on decentralisation, IPFS, and Filecoin is here! DI2F is taking place alongside IFIP Networking 2021 on 21 June 2021 and has a packed programme full of interesting paper presentations, demos, abstracts, hands-on tutorials and invited talks!
Yiannis Psaras, Jorge M. Soares
Distributed systems, Networking
2021-05-13/News
ResNetLab on Tour: Blockchain@Berkeley
We were delighted to present our brand new ResNetLab on Tour programme to the vibrant community of the Berkeley’s Blockchain Innovation Hub on April 28th and 29th! The ResNetLab on Tour programme is a one-stop-shop for all things IPFS and Web 3.
Distributed systems, Networking
2021-04-06/News
ResNetLab on Tour tutorials go on-demand
We started the ResNetLab on Tour programme in late 2019 with the goal of onboarding the research and academic community to the IPFS architecture and the interesting open problems and research directions associated with the decentralisation of internet services.
Distributed systems, Networking
2021-03-16/Talks
FOSDEM is one of the biggest events for software developers building open-source software. Founded in 2000, the conference takes place once a year in Brussels, gathering over 8000 developers, hackers, and engineers from across the spectrum of software development.
Alfonso de la Rocha, Nicolas Gailly, Molly Mackinlay, Yiannis Psaras
ResNetLab welcomes Barath Raghavan as a research advisor
We are pleased to announce that Barath Raghavan will be working with ResNetLab as an advisor. Barath is a professor of computer science at USC, where he co-leads the networked systems lab and conducts research across the fields of core networked systems, computing for social good and sustainability, and security.
Distributed systems, Networking
2021-02-11/Talks
IEEE GLOBECOM 2020 - The InterPlanetary File System and the Filecoin Network
IEEE Globecom is one of the flagship IEEE ComSoc conferences in the field of networks and communications – and, with over 2000 attendees, one of the largest conferences in the field.
2021-02-03/Event
Since the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) was first introduced in a 2014 whitepaper, interest from the research community on improving and building on its protocol stack has been steadily growing. A search for “IPFS networking” on Google Scholar now returns over 1500 results, and that is just a fraction of the relevant publications.
Yiannis Psaras, Jorge M. Soares
Networking, Distributed systems
2021-01-20/Blog
ResNetLab 2020 in review: we love it when a plan comes together
We hope you spent some fantastic time with your loved ones during the holiday season. With the time to pause, rest, and reflect – and with the goal of kicking off 2021 in the best way possible – we decided to capture ResNetLab’s 2020 highlights, share what we’ve learned, and describe what we will be focusing on in 2021.
Distributed systems, Networking
2021-01-11/Blog
Beyond Swapping Bits: project review (and preview!)
If you have been following along for the past three months (1, 2, 3, 4), you know that we in ResNetLab started the Beyond Bitswap project with one goal in mind: to drive speed-ups for file-sharing in IPFS.
Distributed systems, Networking
2021-01-01/Blog
Our Bitswap nodes have become “jumping inspectors” (updated)
A few weeks ago, we shared how we have taught our Bitswap nodes to jump. If you recall from that post, the content discovery range extension gained came at the expense of an increased number of duplicate blocks exchanged in the network.
Distributed systems, Networking
2020-12-10/Blog
Teaching Bitswap nodes to jump
By now you may have heard about ResNetLab’s research endeavour to drive speed-ups on file transfers: Beyond Swapping Bits. Our recent blog post, “Honey, I shrunk our libp2p streams”, considers how adding compression to libp2p could lead to significant bandwidth savings.
Distributed systems, Networking
2020-11-25/Talks
IEEE/IFIP CNSM 2020 - The InterPlanetary File System and the Filecoin Network
ResNetLab was invited to present a 3.5 hour tutorial at one of the biggest conferences in the “NetMan” community, the 16th International Conference on Network and Service Management. We were impressed by the quality of talks, keynotes, workshops, and tutorials presented during the conference.
2020-11-23/Blog
A research perspective on Filecoin, part two
In Part One, we traced the intellectual and technological history of modern implementations of distributed ledger technology. Now let’s take a stroll through the technological landscape around the time of Filecoin’s release:
David Dalrymple, Irene Giacomelli, Karola Kirsanow
Cryptoeconomics, Cryptography, Distributed systems
2020-11-16/Blog
A research perspective on Filecoin
The Filecoin network is launching in the middle of a revolution in internet architecture, where vulnerable centralized services dependent on trusted parties are being replaced with resilient decentralized solutions based on verifiable computation, and internet services are being relocated from inefficient central monoliths to the far reaches of the network by peer-to-peer markets.
2020-11-03/Blog
"Two ears, one mouth": how to leverage bitswap chatter for faster transfers
As part of ResNetLab’s research endeavour to drive speed-ups on file transfers, Beyond Swapping Bits, we present a new contribution to IPFS Bitswap protocol. We argue that Bitswap is currently discarding a wealth of information that could be used to its benefit, improving retrieval success and minimizing the latency to retrieve content.
Distributed systems, Networking
2020-10-29/Blog
Honey, I shrunk our libp2p streams
Today we’re excited to share the story of how we decided to explore compression for libp2p streams and ended up achieving up to a 75% decrease in bandwidth use when performing an IPFS file exchange.
Distributed systems, Networking
Meet the latest Protocol Labs Research Grant recipients
In January of 2020, the Resilient Networks Lab (ResNetLab) launched two RFPs (Requests for Proposals) to address pressing open problems faced by IPFS and libp2p, namely, Routing at Scale and PubSub at Scale.
Distributed systems, Networking
2020-10-06/Blog
GossipSub: An attack-resilient messaging-layer protocol for public blockchains
Securing permissionless networks is the bane of open networks, starting with the Internet and every overlay network that operates over it. This challenge has existed from the early days of the Internet to the current Web 3.
Distributed systems, Networking
2020-09-18/Blog
A brief history of (re)building the Internet
The Internet began life as a military network engineered for resilience in the face of a nuclear attack. That’s right—the same network you use to check on your friends and share cat photos has at its core a structural pattern intended to survive a nuclear exchange long enough to mutually assure destruction with the USSR.
Distributed systems, Networking
2020-07-01/Talks
IEEE/IFIP DSN 2020 - The InterPlanetary File System and the Filecoin Network
ResNetLab was invited to present “The InterPlanetary File System and the Filecoin Network” in a 3-hour tutorial at the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks! The conference, now in its 50th edition, has an established track record of top-quality research contributions, and is one of the oldest conferences in its subject area.
2020-06-08/Talks
IPFS talk at the IRTF Decentralised Internet Infrastructure Research Group meeting
ResNetLab was invited to meet with the Decentralised Internet Infrastructure Research Group (DINRG) of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) to present and discuss the Software Architecture of the IPFS protocol.
2020-05-18/Talks
NDN Seminar: a high-level overview of the InterPlanetary File System
ResNetLab was invited to present the “High-Level Overview of the IPFS Architecture” to the Named Data Networking consortium!
2020-05-07/Talks
Next Generation Networks (NGN) group talk: A high-level overview of the InterPlanetary File System
The Next Generation Networks (NGN) group recently invited the Resilient Networks Lab (ResNetLab) to present a tutorial on IPFS. NGN is a vibrant group of academics, industry researchers and engineers working in the general area of — you guessed it — next-generation networks.
2020-05-03/Talks
IEEE ICBC 2020: The InterPlanetary File System and the Filecoin Network
ResNetLab presented at one of the most prominent conferences in the area of Distributed Ledger Technologies: the IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies! IEEE ICBC 2020 took place remotely, was well-attended, and had an exciting programme both in terms of tutorials during the first day and invited talks during the main conference, where Vitalik Buterin delivered the keynote speech.
2020-04-17/Talks
Gossipsub v1.1 at 'Open Tech Will Save Us' virtual event
ResNetLab was present at Open Tech Will Save Us virtual meetup, an event organized by the Matrix.org team during which participants could watch a live stream provided by Jitsi and ask questions using the Matrix protocol (often through a client like Riot).
Yiannis Psaras joins Protocol Labs Research
Yiannis (Ioannis) is joining the Resilient Networks Lab, which he helped get off the ground after becoming an advisor to PL in July 2019. Yiannis is currently a fellow of the United Kingdom’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and a Lecturer at University College London, where he has worked on a number of topics within the broad field of networking, with a significant focus on Information-Centric Networking (ICN).
Distributed systems, Networking
Sarah Azouvi joins Protocol Labs Research
Sarah joins us from the Information Security Group at University College London, where she did research on consensus and worked towards her forthcoming PhD in Computer Science. During her studies, she collaborated with Protocol Labs and was also an intern at Calibra.
Distributed systems, Cryptography
Luca Nizzardo’s thesis wins UPM Extraordinary Award
Source: IMDEA Software Institute. Posted here with permission. Luca Nizzardo was a PhD student of the IMDEA Software Institute and his thesis “Cryptographic Techniques for the Security of Cloud and Blockchain Systems” defended in 2018 was directed by Associate Professor Dario Fiore.
Distributed systems, Cryptography
2019-12-30/News
A new lab for resilient networks research
Resiliency is at the core of systems that are capable of standing the test of time, providing unshakable access for the many generations to come. A resilient system or network is fundamentally uncompromised by an isolated failure or network split.