Many permissionless systems are based on a global, collective assumption about adversarial behavior – e.g. that less than 50% of hashing power or staked tokens are adversarial, as in Bitcoin and Ethereum.

However, other systems, like the XRP ledger, MobileCoin, the Stellar network, and the Anoma protocol, allow each participant to flexibly make its own assumptions about failures and adversaries. This flexibility is useful, for example:

• As a more egalitarian approach than proof-of-work and proof-of-stake for building permissionless systems, e.g. using asymmetric, trust-based quorum systems.
• Allowing each validator to choose its own tradeoff between performance and security by adjusting its quorums.
• For Oracle networks, where users may have different degrees of trust in different signers.
• As a more inclusive system that allows participants to coexist constructively, with different (or even incompatible) beliefs and assumptions.

The design space for heterogeneous-trust systems has attracted the attention of several research groups, leading to disparate models and algorithms.

We would like to encourage this work to consolidate and thus move forward this mathematically interesting and practically important field. The workshop will bring together researchers interested in distributed systems based on heterogeneous trust, and help coalesce a new and active community on topic.

Location and dates

The workshop co-located with AFT 2023 and will take place on October 26th, 2023 in Princeton, New Jersey.

Speakers

• David Mazières, Stanford University, USA
• Jamie Gabbay, Heriott-Watt University, UK
• Isaac C. Sheff, Heliax
• Ling Ren, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
• Mohsen Lesani, University of California, Riverside, USA
• Orestis Alpos, University of Bern, Switzerland
• Srivatsan Sridhar, Stanford University, USA
• Kartik Nayak, Duke University, USA
• More to come…

Travel Grants

The Stellar Development Foundation offers a limited number of travel grants for graduate students, with priority given to speakers at the workshop. Please fill out the application form to apply, indicating in the last question in the form that you are applying for support to attend this workshop.

Call for abstracts

We solicit submissions of talk abstracts and full papers on topics related to heterogeneous trust in distributed systems, including but not limited to:

• Mathematical models of heterogeneous trust
• Distributed algorithms under heterogeneous-trust models, including consensus algorithms
• Descriptions of system designs or implementations based on heterogeneous trust
• Sybil resilience based on heterogeneous trust
• Peer-to-peer networking based on heterogeneous trust
• Cryptography and multi-party computation under heterogeneous trust assumptions
• Heterogeneous trust in reconfigurable and dynamic systems
• Social dynamics in heterogeneous trust systems

Talks will be 30 minutes + questions. Submissions can be extended abstracts (from a few paragraphs to maximum 5 pages) or full papers (maximum 15 pages) in a format of the author’s choosing. Please send you submissions to the organizers by email before September 22nd.

There will not be any workshop proceedings, but authors of selected submissions will be invited to submit a paper to a journal special issue.

Organizers

• Christian Cachin, University of Bern (email)
• Giuliano Losa, Stellar Development Foundation (email)