Abstract

Most critical sectors of society are today managed by highly complex centralized distributed systems. Due to their central entity dependance, such systems suffer from severe scalability and availability limitations, motivating the need for completely decentralized solutions. However, existing decentralized systems still suffer from security issues that hinder their wide adoption.

HADES proposes a novel secure, more efficient, and scalable approach to building completely decentralized systems for society critical applications. Building on emerging technologies for trusted computing, including Intel SGX and ARM TrustZone, HADES will leverage a distributed system model of hardware-backed trusted execution environments. This model will allow critical application logic to be performed in isolation from other (possibly malicious) processes, and will be key to reducing computational and communicational costs of expensive cryptographic protocols used today in secure decentralized systems.

To achieve its goals, HADES will study these new trusted technologies and the guarantees they provide, from both practical and theoretical perspectives. From this study a new toolbox of hardware-backed abstractions will be proposed, which will be used to develop new protocols for decentralized storage and processing applications. Finally, the project will evaluate its results through both experimental and formal analysis, providing concrete guarantees of its security, performance, and scalability properties.

Open Positions

There are some positions available in the context of this project:

• 1 Post-Doc position
• PhD student positions
• MSc student positions

For inquiries related with these oportunities please contact Bernardo Ferreira for more information.

Members

• Bernardo Ferreira (PI)
• Manuel Barbosa (Co-PI)
• Nuno Preguiça
• João Leitão
• Henrique Domingos
• Bernardo Portela
• Tiago Oliveira
• Albert van der Linde