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  4. Rethinking General-Purpose Decentralized Computing
 
conference paper

Rethinking General-Purpose Decentralized Computing

Alp, Enis Ceyhun  
•
Kokoris-Kogias, Eleftherios  
•
Fragkouli, Georgia  
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January 1, 2019
HotOS '19: Proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems
Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS)

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 data. In this paper we present Protean, a general-purpose decentralized computing platform that addresses these limitations by moving from a monolithic execution model, where all participating nodes store all the state and execute every computation, to a modular execution-model. Protean employs secure specialized modules, called functional units, for building decentralized applications that are currently insecure or impossible to implement with smart contracts. Each functional unit is a distributed system that provides a special-purpose functionality by exposing atomic transactions to the smart-contract developer. Combining these transactions into arbitrarily-defined workflows, developers can build a larger class of decentralized applications, such as provably-secure and fair lotteries or e-voting.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1145/3317550.3321448
Web of Science ID

WOS:000474421800015

Author(s)
Alp, Enis Ceyhun  
Kokoris-Kogias, Eleftherios  
Fragkouli, Georgia  
Ford, Bryan  
Date Issued

2019-01-01

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

Publisher place

New York

Published in
HotOS '19: Proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems
ISBN of the book

978-1-4503-6727-1

Total of pages

8

Start page

105

End page

112

Subjects

Computer Science, Theory & Methods

•

Computer Science

•

blockchain

•

smart contracts

•

decentralized computing

•

modularity

•

transactions

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
DEDIS  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS)

Bertinoro, ITALY

May 13-15, 2019

Available on Infoscience
July 24, 2019
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/159305
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