Coordinator: François Taïani (WIDE)
Participants: François Taïani (WIDE), Gérald Oster (COAST), Davide Frey (WIDE), Claudia-Lavinia Ignat (COAST), Amine Ismail (hive)
Context
A key challenge in a distributed storage system lies in withstanding the behavior of Byzantine nodes. This can result from malicious actors or simply from bugs or hardware problems, but in all cases they can render the system unusable in the absence of proper protocols. Research in distributed algorithms has led to a number of protocols for managing Byzantine behavior in a classical, permissioned, setting. Yet Byzantine fault tolerance in open permissionless settings remains challenging. Currently, used methods like Proof-of-Work (PoW) or Proof-of-Stake (PoS) each have their own limitations. PoW suffers from enormous energy consumption, while PoS relies on the presence of a cryptocurrency or other similar asset.
Recent research has shown that, albeit promoted in the context of Bitcoin, the blockchain data structure is unnecessary to implement a cryptocurrency. This has led to the appearance of a variety of proposals that implement cryptocurrencies with lighter primitives such as Byzantine Reliable Broadcast. This simplification is likely to extend to a variety of other applications that currently fall under the Blockchain hype, including distributed storage.
Objective
In this project we plan to explore novel techniques to handle Sybil and Byzantine attacks in the context of distributed storage. We will explore distributed storage solutions that, while not requiring the presence of a classical blockchain, can offer the same or even stronger guarantees in terms of fault-tolerance, data persistence, privacy, and security. We will study the interplay between Byzantine fault tolerance and security properties such as data availability, confidentiality and integrity. We have to maintain the same security properties as for a distributed environment without any Byzantine nodes.
