Building Trust between Users in Decentralized Systems

Martijn de Vos Delft University of Technology Tuesday, March 29, 2022 @ 10:00 am Room BC 420 Hosted by: Prof. Anne-Marie Kermarrec

Abstract

During the last few years, there has been a renewed interest in designing and deploying decentralized systems. Decentralized systems aim to remove the authority by centralized parties and instead rely on direct cooperation between users. Bitcoin, Tor, and BitTorrent are well-known decentralized systems that do not rely on central servers or authoritative parties. Compared to systems that are managed by central authorities, various threats in decentralized systems, including free-riding, spam, and unlimited identity creation (the Sybil Attack), are more challenging to address. Building trust between users has been proven to be a successful strategy for mitigating such threats and realizing sustainable decentralized systems. This talk will outline our labs’ vision and approach to building trust between users in decentralized systems. I will outline various solutions and elaborate on our unique deployment-oriented research methodology. To deploy our algorithms to end-users, we use Tribler, our academic file-sharing software. Tribler is used daily by thousands of users, making it a suitable platform to test and improve our ideas.

Bio

Martijn de Vos is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and part of the Distributed Systems group. He is currently working on building trust in large-scale, open content networks. During his PhD at Delft University of Technology, he focussed on decentralized and disintermediation in blockchain-based electronic marketplaces. He is also a contributor to Tribler, an open-source and decentralized file-sharing system.