Dissertation Topic
System Security in Blockchains and Decentralized Applications
Academic Year: 2024/2025
Supervisor: Rogalewicz Adam, doc. Mgr., Ph.D.
Co-supervisor: Homoliak Ivan, doc. Ing., Ph.D.
Department: Department of Intelligent Systems
Programs:
Information Technology (DIT) - full-time study
Information Technology (DIT) - combined study
Information Technology (DIT-EN) - full-time study
Information Technology (DIT-EN) - combined study
This work addresses several research directions.:
- Consensus Protocols in Blockchains
The goal of this direction is to theroeticaly and practically analyze selected categories of consensus protocols in terms of throughput and security. The thesis should contain evaluation of consensus protocols by simulations enabling to test the response of protocols under different network conditions and honest/adversarial consensus power. New scenarios of attacks should be investigated -- e.g., assuming violation of the protocol assumptions or incentives. The work should also leverage principles from game theory and statistical analysis. Examples of attacks to investigate are selfish mining attacks, pool specific attacks, double spending attacks, attacks on shards, posterior corruption attacks, denial of service on the leader committee, long-range attacks, nothing-at-stake attacks, grinding attacks, etc. This topic is broad and can be furher subdiveded to multiple PhD students.
- Zero-knowledge constructs in the context of the public blockchains
This direction is intended for exploration of the possible applications of ZK constructs in the context of the public blockchains. ZK constructs are used to provide public verification of the correctness of a certain computation or operation without revealing any private data related to the computation/operation. In this way, it is possible to implement, for example, public voting or auction protocols that preserve privacy of data publicly produced by distributed participants. The most common ZK constructs are often instantiated by schemes that provide homomorphic encryption, such as ElGammal encryption or integer arithmetic fields over modulo N. However, the feasibility of these constructs in the domain of the public blockchain may vary due to possible high costs, or security aspects. The role of this thesis is to analyze and quantify these existing options and implement the most meaningful (and novel) applications.
- Scalable Blockchain-Based Elections
One goal of this direction is to propose a scalable decentralized e-voting system based on smart contracts, with maximum voter privacy, fault tolerance, and coercion resistance. The first challenge is to optimize costs the for running expensive zero-knowledge proof verification at smart contract by off-chain constructs. The second challenge is the scalability w.r.t. to the number of participants and vote choices, which depends on the convenient type of the blockchain and its consensus mechanism, such as semi-permissionless blockchains (PoS) and permissioned blockchains (PoA). Another topic of this direction are partial tally-hiding protocols and their application in the context of public blockchains. The last topic is the eligibility of participants and its public verifiability/guarantees.