Bryan Alexander Ford

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Bias-resistant public randomness is a critical component in many (distributed) protocols. Existing solutions do not scale to hundreds or thousands of participants, as is needed in many decentralized systems. We propose two large-scale distributed protocols ...

The conceptual design phase is a fascinating moment to observe how a design task is interpreted, as the (often implicit) relative importance students accord to the various requirements and constraints offers a window into the thinking underpinning their de ...

Federated identity providers, e.g., Facebook and PayPal, offer a convenient means for authenticating users to third-party applications. Unfortunately such cross-site authentications carry privacy and tracking risks. For example, federated identity provider ...

Front-running, the practice of benefiting from advanced knowledge of pending transactions, has proliferated in the cryptocurrency space with the emergence of decentralized finance. Front-running causes devastating losses to honest participants-estimated at ...

The secret keys of critical network authorities – such as time, name, certificate, and software update services – represent high-value targets for hackers, criminals, and spy agencies wishing to use these keys secretly to compromise other hosts. To protect ...

Online voting is attractive for convenience and accessibility, but is more susceptible to voter coercion and vote buying than in-person voting. One mitigation is to give voters fake voting credentials that they can yield to a coercer. Fake credentials appe ...

Distributed ledgers provide high availability and integrity, making them a key enabler for practical and secure computation of distributed workloads among mutually distrustful parties. Many practical applications also require strong confidentiality, howeve ...

Most encrypted data formats leak metadata via their plaintext headers, such as format version, encryption schemes used, number of recipients who can decrypt the data, and even the recipients’ identities. This leakage can pose security and privacy risks to ...

Humanitarian action, the process of aiding individuals in situations of crises, poses unique information-security challenges due to natural or manmade disasters, the adverse environments in which it takes place, and the scale and multidisciplinary nature o ...

Software-update mechanisms are critical to the security of modern systems, but their typically centralized design presents a lucrative and frequently attacked target. In this work, we propose CHAINIAC, a decentralized software-update framework that elimina ...

Permissionless blockchain-based cryptocurrencies commonly use proof-of-work (PoW) or proof-of-stake (PoS) to ensure their security, e.g. to prevent double spending attacks. However, both approaches have disadvantages: PoW leads to massive amounts of wasted ...

While technology is often claimed to be “democratizing”, the technologizing of society has more often yielded undemocratic or even anti-democratic outcomes. Is technology fundamentally at odds with democracy, or is it merely a rich and infinitely-adaptable ...

Internet blackouts are challenging environments for anonymity and censorship resistance. Existing popular anonymity networks (e.g., Freenet, I2P, Tor) rely on Internet connectivity to function, making them impracticable during such blackouts. In such a set ...

While showing great promise, smart contracts are difficult to program correctly, as they need a deep understanding of cryptography and distributed algorithms, and offer limited functionality, as they have to be deterministic and cannot operate on secret da ...

Current solutions for privacy-preserving data sharing among multiple parties either depend on a centralized authority that must be trusted and provides only weakest-link security (e.g., the entity that manages private/secret cryptographic keys), or leverag ...

In recent work on open, privacy-preserving, accountable surveillance, we have proposed the use of cryptographic protocols that enable law-enforcement and intelligence agencies to obtain actionable information about targeted users of mass-communication syst ...

Failures far away from a user should intuitively be less likely to affect that user. Today's ecosystem miserably fails this test, however, despite high-availability best practices. Correlated and cascading failures – triggered by misconfigurations, bugs, a ...

Leader-based consensus algorithms are fast and efficient under normal conditions, but lack robustness to adverse conditions due to their reliance on timeouts for liveness. We present QuePaxa, the first protocol offering state-of-the-art normal-case efficie ...

The ease of creating fake virtual identities plays an important role in shaping the way information — and misinformation — circulates online. Social media platforms are increasingly prominent in shaping public debates, and the tension between online anonym ...

Consensus protocols for asynchronous networks are usually complex and inefficient, leading practical systems to rely on synchronous protocols. The invention proposes an approach to simplify asynchronous consensus by building it atop a novel threshold logic ...

Bryan Alexander Ford

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Scalable Bias-Resistant Distributed Randomness

Sustainability and Ethicality are Peripheral to Students’ Software Design

Building Privacy-Preserving Cryptographic Credentials from Federated Online Identities

Flash Freezing Flash Boys: Countering Blockchain Front-Running

Keeping Authorities “Honest or Bust” with Decentralized Witness Cosigning

E-Vote Your Conscience: Perceptions of Coercion and Vote Buying, and the Usability of Fake Credentials in Online Voting

CALYPSO: Private Data Management for Decentralized Ledgers

Reducing Metadata Leakage from Encrypted Files and Communication with PURBs

On Enforcing the Digital Immunity of a Large Humanitarian Organization

CHAINIAC: Proactive Software-Update Transparency via Collectively Signed Skipchains and Verified Builds

Proof-of-Personhood: Redemocratizing Permissionless Cryptocurrencies

Technologizing Democracy or Democratizing Technology? A Layered-Architecture Perspective on Potentials and Challenges

Moby: A Blackout-Resistant Anonymity Network for Mobile Devices

Rethinking General-Purpose Decentralized Computing

UnLynx: A Decentralized System for Privacy-Conscious Data Sharing

Multiple Objectives of Lawful-Surveillance Protocols

Immunizing Systems from Distant Failures by Limiting Lamport Exposure

QuePaxa: Escaping the Tyranny of Timeouts in Consensus

Using “proof of personhood” to tackle social media risks

Asynchronous distributed coordination and consensus with threshold logical clocks