CIT 02-Distributed Ledger

TUM SUPPRA

CIT - Electrical and Computer Engineering

Chair of Network Architectures and Services

Distributed Systems Security, Distributed Ledger Technologies, Privacy & Security

Computer EngineeringComputer ScienceComputer Science/ InformaticsElectrical Engineering

Planned project location:

Institut für Informatik der
Technischen Universität München
Lehrstuhl I8
Boltzmannstr. 3
85748 Garching bei München - Germany

Prof. Dr.-Ing.

Georg

Carle

carle@net.in.tum.de

+ 49 89 289 18030

Filip

Rezabek

rezabek@net.in.tum.de

Richard

von Seck

seck@net.in.tum.de

The student/s would investigate the state-of-the-art blockchain technologies within the research groups activities. The focus would be to improve the system’s performance, security, usability, or privacy. The research group has a unique testbed where various blockchain protocols can be evaluated under different conditions. Besides, we also have a large amount of on-chain and off-chain data at our disposal from various blockchains as we have several mainnet nodes from various blockchain running in our infrastructure. The research goals would aim to assess the research targets with a Proof of Concept (PoC) implementation.
The activities might touch upon topics related to individual layers of blockchain starting with network layer, consensus layer, execution layer, until the application layer. Such activities can include focus on private compute on permissioneless blockchains using threshold cryptography or trusted execution environments, Maximal Extractable Value prevention (MEV) prevention techniques, wallet/private key management, scalability of blockchains using zero knowledge proofs or network optimizations, network attacks robustness, and others.
As we offer topics for two students, there might certain synergies between the students.
First, the optimization aspects can be categorized on networking layer, consensus, or application layers improvement. First, we identify bottlenecks and search for their mitigation with respect to the individual layer and aim to model and later on optimize the critical path optimization. The conclusions can be a new optimized data dissemination protocols of transactions or votes, improving the crypto layer load, or others. Such optimizations can improve the scalability of the given deployment and provide additional robustness guarantees.
For the second topic, we consider security and privacy aspects of the users in the network and in general security and decentralization of the underlying as well. This can be considered by usage of privacy preserving networks e.g., Nym, threshold cryptography or other advanced cryptography primitives to offer users privacy, or certain peer-to-peer layer attack resilience.
Additional focus can be on the private chains and oracle problem in general using various cryptographic primitives. All data that are not on the chain by default must be queried from outside resources, which if malicious, can provide incorrect data. It is crucial to make sure such external data provide data provenance and integrity with accountability.
The possible list of advisors for the topic might be extended depending on the final focus of the project.
The student/s tasks would be the following:
• Get familiar with the infrastructure of the Chair for reproducible blockchain experiments
• Get familiar with the blockchain technologies
• Identify suitable approaches for enhancing performance and/or security aspects of a corresponding blockchain protocol
• Implement the techniques into the evaluation framework
• Evaluate the impact of the techniques on overall performance of the system on theoretical and practical
The expected outcome is to provide:
• Understanding of corresponding blockchain protocol
• Identification of its bottlenecks or security challenges
• Improvements on the current state of the corresponding technology
• Assessment of supported by qualitative and quantitative results
For more details navigate to [1] and [2].
[1] - https://net.in.tum.de/theses/
[2] - https://net.in.tum.de/publications/

35

3 years of bachelor studies completed

Previous experience in networking, security, or blockchain related technologies is welcomed. We are open to discuss ideas related to the topics described above and finalize the final topic direction together.

If you are sending an email to us, please contact always all three advisors so the response can be faster.