Description:
The course will focus on distributed and decentralized settings where multiple parties must
collaboratively work together towards common goals despite security breaches that may have compromised
some parties in an adversarial manner. It aims to bring together foundational distributed trust issues studied
in disparate fields of study ranging from (i) distributed computing (specifically, Byzantine fault tolerance), (ii)
blockchains and smart contracts, (iii) secure multi-party computation, and (iv) reputation and trust in multiagent systems.
CourseContent:
The course will focus on the following broad modules.
- Byzantine fault tolerance: Byzantine
resilient distributed algorithms for agreement, reliable broadcast, leader election, state machine replication;
applications like Byzantine resilience in machine learning and mobile agents. (10 lectures)
- Principles of
Blockchains and their applications: distributed ledgers like Blockchains and Hashgraphs; Sybil resilient
Byzantine agreement and state machine replication, proof-of-work, proof-of-stake; smart contracts and their
applications like e-governance, asset management, record keeping (e.g., healthcare), and supply chain
management. (10 lectures)
- Cryptographic aspects of distributed trust: secret sharing, secure multi-party
computation, threshold cryptosystems, blind signatures, and other such cryptographic notions that capture
aspects of distributed trust along with applications like double auction and e-voting. (20 lectures)
- Autonomous Multi-Agent Systems: Computational trust and reputation, definitions, models, and metrics;
decentralized aspects of trust and reputation; applications like autonomous vehicles and swarm robotics. (20 lectures)
TextBooks: Elaine Shi. Foundations of Distributed Consensus and Blockchains. Book manuscript, 2020.
Available at https://www.distributedconsensus.net. • Christian Cachin, Rachid Guerraoui, and Lus Rodrigues.
Introduction to Reliable and Secure Distributed Programming. Second edition, 2011. Springer Publishing
Company, Incorporated. • Roger Wattenhofer. The Science of the Blockchain. First edition, 2016.
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, North Charleston, SC, USA. • Jonathan Katz and Yehuda
Lindell. Introduction to Modern Cryptography, Second Edition. Second edition, 2014. Chapman & Hall/CRC. •
Ronald Cramer, Ivan Bjerre Damgård, and Jesper Buus Nielsen. Secure Multiparty Computation and Secret
Sharing. First edition, 2015. Cambridge University Press, USA.
ReferenceBooks:
1. Hagit Attiya and Jennifer Welch. 2004. Distributed Computing: Fundamentals,
Simulations and Advanced Topics. John Wiley and Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, USA.
2. Paola Flocchini, Giuseppe
Prencipe, Nicola Santoro. 2019. Distributed Computing by Mobile Entities, Current Research in Moving and
Computing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 11340, Springer.
3. Diego de Siqueira Braga, Marco
Niemann, Bernd Hellingrath, and Fernando Buarque de Lima Neto. 2018. Survey on Computational Trust and
Reputation Models. ACM Comput. Surv. 51, 5, Article 101 (November 2018), 40 pages.
