Research profile
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. The current focus of our group is 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.
We have has also contributed research for many years in the fields of mobility (connected vehicles, "Car-to-X Communication"), decentral energy systems, and federative identity managment.
Our group designs and analyses techniques with the particular focus on security, performance, and deployability:
- Security: explicit modelling of trust and "tunable security"
- Performance: performance evaluation through discrete event modelling and simulation
- Deployability: deployability is part of the requirement and evaluation
| Title | Author | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Brief Announcement: Let It TEE: Asynchronous Byzantine Atomic Broadcast with n ≥ 2f+1 | 37th International Symposium on Distributed Computing, DISC 2023, October 10-12, 2023, L'Aquila, Italy. doi:10.4230/LIPICS.DISC.2023.43 |
|
| Price Oracle Accuracy Across Blockchains: A Measurement and Analysis | Gansäuer, R.; Ben Aoun, H.; Droll, J., |
4th International Workshop on Cryptoasset Analytics (CAAW), Co-located with Financial Cryptography and Data Security, April 18, 2025, Miyakojima, Japan. CAAW25p22 |
| Short Paper: What Peer Announcements Tell Us About the Size of the Bitcoin P2P Network | Matthias Grundmann, Hedwig Amberg, Max Baumstark, and Hannes Hartenstein |
Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2022 (FC'22) |
| BlueSky: How to Raise a Robot - A Case for Neuro-Symbolic AI in Constrained Task Planning for Humanoid Assistive Robots | Hemken, N.; Jacob, F.; Tërnava, F.; Kartmann, R.; Asfour, T.; Hartenstein, H. |
Proceedings of the 29th ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies, San Antonio, 15th-17th May 2024, SACMAT 2024, doi:10.1145/3649158.3657034 |
| To the Best of Knowledge and Belief: On Eventually Consistent Access Control | Proceedings of the Fifteenth ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY ’25), June 4–6, 2025, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. doi:10.1145/3714393.3726520 |
Research areas
Security and Anonymity of Blockchain Networks
- Monitoring and experiments in the Bitcoin p2p network: dsn.tm.kit.edu/bitcoin
- Development of simulation models for simulation of the Bitcoin p2p network
- Evaluation of security and performance
Crypto Currencies and Consensus
- Global consensus
- Payment channels and other off-chain techniques
Modelling of Decentralized Trust
- Trusted execution environments
- Identity and key management
- Privacy and data protection
Simulation and Methods for Simulation
- Development of complex models for simulation
- Analysis of models for simulation
- Simulation methods and optimization
Funded Research Projects
As a research group, we are and were involved in several projects on research, standardisation, and integration. Listed below is an overview of current and finished projects that we are or were a part of.