System Security in Blockchains and Consensus Protocols

The goal of this thesis is to theoretically and practically analyze selected categories of consensus protocols in terms of throughput and security. The thesis should contain the 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 further subdivided to multiple PhD students.