On Secure Workflow Decentralisation on the Internet

Decentralised workflow management systems are a new research area, where most work to-date has focused on the system's overall architecture. As little attention has been given to the security aspects in such systems, we follow a security driven approach, and consider, from the perspective of available security building blocks, how security can be implemented and what new opportunities are presented when empowering the decentralised environment with modern distributed security protocols. Our research is motivated by a more general question of how to combine the positive enablers that email exchange enjoys, with the general benefits of workflow systems, and more specifically with the benefits that can be introduced in a decentralised environment. This aims to equip email users with a set of tools to manage the semantics of a message exchange, contents, participants and their roles in the exchange in an environment that provides inherent assurances of security and privacy. This work is based on a survey of contemporary distributed security protocols, and considers how these protocols could be used in implementing a distributed workflow management system with decentralised control . We review a set of these protocols, focusing on the required message sequences in reviewing the protocols, and discuss how these security protocols provide the foundations for implementing core control-flow, data, and resource patterns in a distributed workflow environment

Decentralization in Bitcoin and Ethereum Networks

Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies have demonstrated how to securely implement traditionally centralized systems, such as currencies, in a decentralized fashion. However, there have been few measurement studies on the level of decentralization they achieve in practice. We present a measurement study on various decentralization metrics of two of the leading cryptocurrencies with the largest market capitalization and user base, Bitcoin and Ethereum. We investigate the extent of decentralization by measuring the network resources of nodes and the interconnection among them, the protocol requirements affecting the operation of nodes, and the robustness of the two systems against attacks. In particular, we adapted existing internet measurement techniques and used the Falcon Relay Network as a novel measurement tool to obtain our data. We discovered that neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum has strictly better properties than the other. We also provide concrete suggestions for improving both systems.Comment: Financial Cryptography and Data Security 201

Systematizing Decentralization and Privacy: Lessons from 15 Years of Research and Deployments

Decentralized systems are a subset of distributed systems where multiple authorities control different components and no authority is fully trusted by all. This implies that any component in a decentralized system is potentially adversarial. We revise fifteen years of research on decentralization and privacy, and provide an overview of key systems, as well as key insights for designers of future systems. We show that decentralized designs can enhance privacy, integrity, and availability but also require careful trade-offs in terms of system complexity, properties provided, and degree of decentralization. These trade-offs need to be understood and navigated by designers. We argue that a combination of insights from cryptography, distributed systems, and mechanism design, aligned with the development of adequate incentives, are necessary to build scalable and successful privacy-preserving decentralized systems