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, consensus and peer-to-peer networks
- Network Security Monitoring
- Secure and privacy-aware computing in partially trustworthy environments.
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The research group Decentralized Systems and Network Services is looking for a new academic staff member with the research focus "Information Security in Decentralized Systems for Networked Mobility". The possibility of pursuing a doctoral degree is given. Further information and contact details can be found on the Human Resources page.
In the coming summer term, we once again offer our Hot Topics seminar with mixed topics around decentralized systems (registration via Wiwi-Portal). We are also involved with the "Internet and Society" seminar (registration via Wiwi-Portal). Both seminars allow presentation and seminar paper in English.
In the upcoming semester, we offer a new course: The Research Focus Class, that combines a seminar with a lecture. In the summer term 2021 we will address aspects of the highly relevant and up-to-date area of Blockchain and Payment Channel Networks. In the lecture as the first part of the course, we will teach basics in this area and in the second part of the course, the seminar, students will work on advanced topics. Register here.
The concept of our course is inspired by the same-titled series of COMSYS at the RWTH Aachen.
In the Open Access journal IEEE Access, our article Analysis of the Matrix Event Graph Replicated Data Type was published. With the aim of application in decentralized publish-subscribe systems, in the paper, we extract and analyze the Matrix Event Graph(MEG) from the Matrix middleware, which is primarily used there to depict the causal history of chat messages. We show that the MEG is a so-called Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type, and thereby provides Strong Eventual Consistency. In addition, we show that the MEG, via its reduced notion of consistency when compared to traditional Distributed Ledger Technologies, can cope with environments where the majority of the participants exhibit byzantine faults. We close the article with an analysis of the scalability in form of the number of parallel causal chains in the MEG, for which we can expect an almost optimal evolution according to our results.