Publications by Bryan Alexander Ford

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

Bryan Alexander Ford, Verónica del Carmen Estrada Galiñanes, Louis-Henri Manuel Jakob Merino, Simone Maria Stefano Colombo, Haoqian Zhang

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 ...

IEEE2024

Breaking Blockchain Rationality with Out-of-Band Collusion

Bryan Alexander Ford, Verónica del Carmen Estrada Galiñanes, Louis-Henri Manuel Jakob Merino, Haoqian Zhang, Mahsa Bastankhah

Blockchain systems often rely on rationality assumptions for their security, expecting that nodes are motivated to maximize their profits. These systems thus design their protocols to incentivize nodes to execute the honest protocol but fail to consider ou ...

Springer International Publishing Ag2024

ZeroAuction: Zero-Deposit Sealed-Bid Auction via Delayed Execution

Bryan Alexander Ford, Verónica del Carmen Estrada Galiñanes, Haoqian Zhang

Auctions, a long-standing method of trading goods and services, are a promising use case for decentralized finance. However, due to the inherent transparency property of blockchains, current sealed-bid auction implementations on smart contracts requires a ...

Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH2024

Authenticated private information retrieval

Bryan Alexander Ford, Simone Maria Stefano Colombo, Henry Nathaniel Corrigan-Gibbs, Kirill Nikitin

This paper introduces protocols for authenticated private information retrieval. These schemes enable a client to fetch a record from a remote database server such that (a) the server does not learn which record the client reads, and (b) the client either ...

Usenix Assoc2023

QuePaxa: Escaping the Tyranny of Timeouts in Consensus

Bryan Alexander Ford, Verónica del Carmen Estrada Galiñanes, Cristina Basescu

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 ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2023

Sustainability and Ethicality are Peripheral to Students’ Software Design

Bryan Alexander Ford, Siara Ruth Isaac, Pierluca Borsò, Aditi Kothiyal

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 ...

Tempus Publications2023

Moby: A Blackout-Resistant Anonymity Network for Mobile Devices

Bryan Alexander Ford, Antoine Rault, Amogh Pradeep, Hira Javaid

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 ...

2022

Flash Freezing Flash Boys: Countering Blockchain Front-Running

Bryan Alexander Ford, Verónica del Carmen Estrada Galiñanes, Louis-Henri Manuel Jakob Merino, Haoqian Zhang

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 ...

IEEE2022

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

Bryan Alexander Ford

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 ...

University of Chicago Press2021

Immunizing Systems from Distant Failures by Limiting Lamport Exposure

Bryan Alexander Ford, Cristina Basescu

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 ...

Association for Computing Machinery2021