Talk de Dr Jérémie Decouchant

Abstract:
In the last decade, Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus has been revisited to better fit the need of blockchains. In particular, streamlined protocols, such as HotStuff, have been proposed as a means to circumvent the inefficient view-changes of traditional protocols, such as PBFT. In parallel, several works have detailed trusted components, and BFT protocols that leverage them to tolerate a minority of faulty nodes and use a reduced number of communication rounds. In this talk I will discuss Damysus (EuroSys'2022), a protocol that reconciles these two lines of work. Damysus builds on two basic trusted services, respectively called the Checker and Accumulator services, which can be leveraged by streamlined protocols. Damysus improves upon HotStuff’s resilience and uses less communication rounds.
If time allows, I will also briefly discuss ongoing works that evaluate the impact of trusted components on lower-level distributed abstractions such as reliable broadcast and reliable communication in partially connected networks, and the next version of Damysus.

Bio:
Jérémie Decouchant is an assistant professor for distributed systems at TU Delft. He is involved in the Delft Blockchain and the Delft FinTech labs. His work revolves around resilient distributed systems, in particular when tensions with privacy, accountability, or performance arise. His research has found applications in fields such as Blockchain, federated learning or peer-to-peer systems.
Before joining TU Delft, he was a research associate (postdoc) and then a research scientist at the SnT/FSTM - University of Luxembourg, working with Paulo Esteves-Veríssimo, and a PhD scholar at the Grenoble Alpes-University, France. His PhD thesis was supervised by Sonia Ben Mokhtar (CNRS) and Vivien Quéma (Grenoble INP). He received an engineering degree from Ensimag - Grenoble INP in 2014.
Titre: Leveraging trusted components for Blockchain consensus and distributed abstractions.