Supporting distributed data management applications among a set of mutually distrustful collaborative enterprises has emerged as a key requirement for today’s large-scale data management systems. While Blockchain was originally devised for Bitcoin cryptocurrency, recent systems focus on its unique features such as provenance, fault tolerance, verifiability, and authenticity to support a wide range of applications.
The goal of this project is to address different challenges regarding the confidentiality, verifiability, performance, and scalability requirements of distributed applications to make permissioned blockchain systems practical in real-life settings.
The project itself consists of several sub-projects to address different challenges.
- Saguaro: a hierarchical permissioned blockchain system designed specifically for wide area networks, optimized to take advantage of edge computing infrastructures and support edge devices’ mobility.
- Qanaat: a scalable multi-enterprise permissioned blockchain system that guarantees the confidentiality of enterprises within and across collaboration workflows.
- Flexchain: a novel disaggregated blockchain service that leverages recent innovations in disaggregated data centers (DDC)
- PriProVer: a framework to support privacy-preserving data provenance using zero-knowledge proofs over hybrid permissioned ledgers.
- Bedrock: A unified platform for Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols design exploration
- DeCon: a declarative programming language for implementing smart contracts and specifying contract-level properties.
Project Personnel
- Boon Thau Loo
- Mohammad Javad Amiri
- Haoxian Chen
- Chenyuan Wu
- Heena Nagda
- Gerald Whitters
- Jared Asch
Publications
- Flexchain: An Elastic Disaggregated Blockchain, Chenyuan Wu, Mohammad Javad Amiri, Jared Asch, Heena Nagda, Qizhen Zhang, Boon Thau Loo, The 49th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), PVLDB 16, Vancouver, Canada, 2023.
- Qanaat: A Scalable Multi-Enterprise Permissioned Blockchain System with Confidentiality Guarantees, Mohammad Javad Amiri, Boon Thau Loo, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi, The 48th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), PVLDB 15(11), pp. 2839-2852, Sydney, Australia, 2022.
- Declarative Smart Contracts, Haoxian Chen, Gerald Whitters, Mohammad Javad Amiri, Yuepeng Wang, Boon Thau Loo, The ACM Joint European SE Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), Singapore, 2022.
Funding
- NSF CNS-2104882: CNS Core: Small: Towards Internet-scale Permissioned Blockchain Infrastructure for the Mobile Internet, Boon Thau Loo (PI), Mohammad Javad Amiri (Co-PI), 10/01/2021-09/30/2024, $ 500,000