Person
Bryan Alexander Ford
Related publications (62)
Asynchronous distributed coordination and consensus with threshold logical clocks
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 ...
2021Technologizing Democracy or Democratizing Technology? A Layered-Architecture Perspective on Potentials and Challenges
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 Press2021Immunizing 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 Machinery2021CALYPSO: Private Data Management for Decentralized Ledgers
Bryan Alexander Ford, Linus Gasser, Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias, Philipp Svetolik Jovanovic, Enis Ceyhun Alp
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 ...
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2020Democratic Value and Money for Decentralized Digital Society
Classical monetary systems regularly subject the most vulnerable majority of the world's population to debilitating financial shocks, and have manifestly allowed uncontrolled global inequality over the long term. Given these basic failures, how can we avoi ...
2020A Liquid Perspective on Democratic Choice
The idea of liquid democracy responds to a widely-felt desire to make democracy more "fluid" and continuously participatory. Its central premise is to enable users to employ networked technologies to control and delegate voting power, to approximate the id ...
2020Que Sera Consensus: Simple Asynchronous Agreement with Private Coins and Threshold Logical Clocks
Bryan Alexander Ford, Philipp Svetolik Jovanovic
It is commonly held that asynchronous consensus is much more complex, difficult, and costly than partially-synchronous algorithms, especially without using common coins. This paper challenges that conventional wisdom with que sera consensus QSC, an approac ...
2020Design choices for Central Bank Digital Currency
Bryan Alexander Ford, Fan Zhang, Srdan Capkun, Ari Juels
Central banks around the world are exploring and in some cases even piloting central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). CBDCs promise to realize a broad range of new capabilities, including direct government disbursements to citizens, frictionless consumer p ...
Brookings Institution2020Identity and Personhood in Digital Democracy: Evaluating Inclusion, Equality, Security, and Privacy in Pseudonym Parties and Other Proofs of Personhood
Digital identity seems at first like a prerequisite for digital democracy: how can we ensure “one person, one vote” online without identifying voters? But the full gamut of digital identity solutions – e.g., online ID checking, biometrics, self-sovereign i ...
2020Reducing Metadata Leakage from Encrypted Files and Communication with PURBs
Jean-Pierre Hubaux, Bryan Alexander Ford, Ludovic Barman, Kirill Nikitin, Wouter Lueks, Matthew Joshua Underwood
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 ...
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