SERIAL '19

3rd Workshop on Scalable and Resilient Infrastructures for Distributed Ledgers (SERIAL 2019)

December 9th, 2019

Programme


Keynote

  • Byzantine Consensus in the Jungle – Geographically-Scalable BFT with Adaptive Weighted Replication (Slide Deck)
    by Alysson Bessani

  • Abstract: The success of bitcoin and other blockchains lead to a renewed interest in Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols, with many recent contributions both from industry and academia. These contributions mostly target one of the fundamental limitations of classical protocols: their lack of scalability on the number of participants. In this talk, I’ll argue that geographical scalability (spreading nodes through the internet) is even more important that such size scalability for BFT protocols. I’ll also present our recent work – WHEAT and AWARE – for providing adaptive geo-distributed replication by leveraging one of the oldest ideas in distributed computing: weighted replication.

  • Bio: Alysson Bessani is an Associate Professor of the University of Lisbon Faculty of Sciences, Portugal, and a member of LASIGE research unit. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UFSC (Brazil) in 2006, was a visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University (2010) and a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge (2014). Alysson coordinated/collaborated in ten international projects and co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications on dependability, security, Byzantine fault tolerance, and cloud storage. He is also the principal researcher behind the BFT-SMaRt consensus library and a co-founder of the Vawlt dependable & secure cloud storage startup. More information about him can be found on his web page.