Decentralized Systems and Network Services Research Group
Under the term "Decentralized Systems and Network Services" we understand distributed and networked technical systems that span over more than one administrative domain. Hence, their operation depends on more than one party. Our research focuses on:
- Blockchains, broadcast and consensus algorithms and smart contracts
- P2P-networks and network monitoring
- Decentralized messaging at the example of Matrix
- Identity Management and Access Control Systems
- Secure and privacy-aware computing in partially trustworthy environments.
News | News Archive
The ROBUST Workshop on Byzantine Fault Tolerance und State Machine Replication takes place with us at KIT in Karlsruhe this year. This workshop aims to bring together leading minds in our field to explore and discuss current and preliminary work with open questions in substantial depth. The event on March 17 and 18, 2025 is planned from lunch to lunch so that there is time to arrive and depart on the same days. The Call for Contributions as well as additional information is found on: ROBUST 2025
At this year's Bitcoin Research Day, Hannes Hartenstein and Matthias Grundmann gave a talk titled "From Monitoring Bitcoin to Verifying Lightning: Modeling Aspects of the Bitcoin Universe". In particular, they presented our research on monitoring the P2P network of Bitcoin and on verification of the Lightning Network's protocol and discussed it with the participants.
The results of the BMWK-supported project SofDCar (Software-Defined Car) were presented to the public today at a technical expo in the Arena2036 in Stuttgart. Oliver Stengele was there and presented the project contributions of the research group to interested visitors. Within SofDCar, we examined the use of decentralized systems like Ethereum and the InterPlanetary File System to make the cooperation of parties along software supply chains more traceable and secure.
While there are already various proposals for peer-to-peer communication for the decentralized messaging middleware Matrix, these proposals require that the receiver and the originator are simultaneously online. We introduce relay-enhanced P2P Matrix (ReP2P Matrix) in order to improve message delivery between peers that are online at different times. We present our new publication on this topic, ReP2P Matrix: Decentralized Relays to Improve Reliability and Performance of Peer-to-Peer Matrix, on the first Decentralization of the Internet Workshop of this year's ACM CoNEXT. The publication is available as open access under CC-BY.