Recent content on Bryan Ford's Home Page
Ananthajit Srikanth and Bryan Ford Isabelle Workshop 2026 June 24–25, 2026 Lisbon, Portugal Abstract: Standard logical foundations in theorem proving constrain the set of recursive functions that are directly expressible to avoid inconsistencies. However, this prevents us from expressing all Turing-complete computations via direct recursive definitions. We consider Grounded Arithmetic, a reasoning…
Invited keynote at DAO Symposium 2026 July 7, 2026 – Winterthur, Switzerland Slides: PDF
Benjamin Bürki M.Sc. thesis in Cyber
Talk at Saul Kripke Center, CUNY March 23, 2026 – CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, USA Abstract: While Kripke inspired numerous alternative approaches to truth and paradox, could we accomplish something like ordinary “working mathematical reasoning” in any of them? Yes. Grounded arithmetic (GA) combines paracomplete reasoning and computational semantics into a concrete, usable, and powerful…
The core purpose of this architectural layer is digital preservation: to maintain a highly resilient, tamper-resistant, and transparent record or history of events. Events recorded in the history may be of all kinds, but the primary emphisis is on recording human-initiated events and processes: the organization and in-person meetups typically including PoP parties, and asynchronous posts,…
Cristina Băsescua, Georgia Fragkouli, Enis Ceyhun Alp, Jose M. Faleiro, Kelong Cong, Vero Estrada-Galiñanes, Michael F. Nowlan, Gaylor Bosson, Pierluca Borsò-Tan, Bryan Ford New Ideas in Networked Systems (NINES) February 10, 2026 Abstract: Globalized computing infrastructures offer the convenience and elasticity of globally managed objects and services, but lack the resilience to distant failures…
Last week my EPFL colleague Martin Rohrmeier (Digital and Cognitive Musicology) pointed out to me the truly fascinating Aymara people and their language, which can directly express 3-valued logic (true, false, uncertain). Aymara is an “existence proof” that the rules of human reasoning are elastic and need not necessarily be dominated exclusively by the classical 2-valued Aristotelian standard.…
Louis-Henri Manuel Jakob Merino Ph.D. thesis advised by Bryan Ford December 5, 2025 Abstract: Online voting promises greater convenience and accessibility, but moving from supervised polling places to unsupervised settings magnifies the risk of coercion and vote buying. A compelling strategy is to give voters fake credentials: credentials that look and behave like real voting credentials but whose…
Talk at Swiss Crypto Day 2025 - Halloween Edition October 31, 2025 – EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland Slides: PDF Related: TRIP system paper TRIP usability paper
Elliot Bobrow, Bryan Ford, and Stefan Milenković arXiv preprint 2510.25369 October 29, 2025 (first version) Abstract: Neither the classical nor intuitionistic logic traditions are perfectly-aligned with the purpose of reasoning about computation, in that neither tradition can permit unconstrained recursive definitions without inconsistency: recursive logical definitions must normally be proven…
Louis-Henri Merino, Simone Colombo, Rene Reyes, Alaleh Azhir, Shailesh Mishra, Pasindu Tennage, Mohammad Amin Raeisi, Haoqian Zhang, Jeff Allen, Bernhard Tellenbach, Vero Estrada-Galiñanes, and Bryan Ford SOSP 2025: The 31st Symposium on Operating Systems Principles October 13–16, 2025 Online voting is convenient and flexible, but amplifies the risks of voter coercion and vote buying. One…
Talk at Dagstuhl Seminar on Trustworthy Evidence-Based Elections October 8, 2025 – Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany Slides: PDF Related: Coercion-resistant E-voting talk Identity and personhood paper TRIP system paper TRIP usability paper
Talk at Dagstuhl Seminar on Trustworthy Evidence-Based Elections October 7, 2025 – Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany Slides: PDF Related: Beyond voting talk TRIP system paper TRIP usability paper
Sascha Kehrli B.Sc. thesis advised by Bryan Ford and Roger Wattenhofer September 30, 2025 Abstract: This thesis presents a foundational formalization of Grounded Arithmetic (GA), a first-order arithmetic based on the principles of Grounded Deduction (GD), directly within the Isabelle/Pure framework. Unlike classical and constructive logics, which impose strict termination requirements on…
David Nicolaus Matthäus Holzwarth B.Sc. thesis advised by Bryan Ford and Pramod Bhatotia August 28, 2025 Abstract: This thesis explores fractional delegation in Liquid Democracy, where voters can split their vote among multiple delegates, aiming to reduce vote concentration and improve representational fairness. We formalize the mode and a method of resolving the final voting power of each…
Pasindu Nivanthaka Tennage Ph.D. thesis advised by Bryan Ford August 15, 2025 Abstract: Deploying consensus protocols in the wide-area is challenging due to unpredictable and adversarial nature of wide-area networks. This thesis explores five critical challenges that affect the operation of consensus protocols in the wide-area networks; (1) performance vulnerability of leader-based protocols to…
Simone Maria Stefano Colombo Ph.D. thesis advised by Bryan Ford January 10, 2025 Abstract: Secure messaging systems are essential for ensuring privacy and confidentiality in today’s digital communication. Thanks to the widespread adoption of end-to-end encryption, messages are accessible only to intended users, and advancements in protocol resilience against secret compromise have enhanced…
Keynote at IC3 Winter Retreat 2025 January 6, 2025 – Engelberg, Switzerland Slides: PDF
Invited talk at DAO Symposium 2024 November 28, 2024 – Zürich, Switzerland Slides: PDF
Bryan Ford arXiv preprint 2409.08243 September 12, 2024 (first version) Abstract: How can we reason around logical paradoxes without falling into them? This paper introduces grounded deduction or GD, a Kripke-inspired approach to first-order logic and arithmetic that is neither classical nor intuitionistic, but nevertheless appears both pragmatically usable and intuitively justifiable. GD permits…
Talk at Seminar 24362 – Next-Generation Secure Distributed Computing September 4, 2024 – Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany Slides: PDF
Louis-Henri Merino, Alaleh Azhir, Haoqian Zhang, Simone Colombo, Bernhard Tellenbach, Vero Estrada-Galiñanes, Bryan Ford 45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy May 20-23, 2024 Abstract: 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…
Keynote at ChainScience 2024 April 5, 2024 – Zürich, Switzerland Slides: PDF
Haoqian Zhang, Michelle Yeo, Vero Estrada-Galinanes, and Bryan Ford 8th Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts (WTSC) March 8, 2024 Abstract: 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…
Enis Ceyhun Alp Ph.D. thesis advised by Bryan Ford January 19, 2024 Abstract: Smart contracts have emerged as the most promising foundations for applications of the blockchain technology. Even though smart contracts are expected to serve as the backbone of the next-generation web, they have several limitations that hinder their widespread adoption, namely limited computational functionality,…
Keynote at 4th International Workshop on Distributed Infrastructure for Common Good (DICG) December 12, 2023 – Bologna, Italy Slides: PDF
Pasindu Tennage, Cristina Basescu, Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Ewa Syta, Philipp Jovanovic, Vero Estrada-Galiñanes, and Bryan Ford 29th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles October 23-26, 2023 Abstract: 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…
Bryan Ford 32nd USENIX Security Symposium August 10, 2023 Abstract: 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 obtains the “authentic” record or detects server misbehavior and safely…
Cristina Băsescu Ph.D. thesis advised by Bryan Ford May 26, 2023 Abstract: Distributed systems designers typically strive to improve performance and preserve availability despite failures or attacks; but, when strong consistency is also needed, they encounter fundamental limitations. The bottleneck is in replica coordination, which is impacted by partitions and slowdowns that can occur anywhere.…
Talk at IC3 Winter Retreat 2023 January 16, 2023 – Les Diablerets, Switzerland Slides: PDF
We often need to embed strings written in one programming language into code written in another. For example, we routinely embed regular expressions and SQL queries within shell scripts or string literals in C-like languages. HTML pages routinely contain embedded JavaScript and CSS code fragments. We often need to embed one URI into another, such as to formulate a query to a Web service that…
Bryan Ford Abstract: Embedding text in one language within text of another is commonplace for numerous purposes, but usually requires tedious and error-prone “escaping” transformations on the embedded string. We propose a simple cross-language syntactic discipline, matchertext, which enables the safe embedding a string in any compliant language into a string in any other language via simple…
Could you use a markup syntax that supports the full expressive power and richness of HTML or XML, but is more terse, easier to type, and less frankly ugly? To emphasize text, for example, would it be nice just to write em[emphasize] instead of <em>emphasize</em>? If so, pleae read on. The tussle between generality and writer-friendliness Markup languages derived from SGML, like HTML and XML, are…
Georgia Fragkouli Ph.D. thesis co-advised by Katerina Argyraki and Bryan Ford August 29, 2022 Abstract: From medical support to education and remote work, our everyday lives increasingly depend on Internet performance. When users experience poor performance, however, the decentralization of the Internet allows limited visibility into which network is responsible. As a result, users are promised…
Haoqian Zhang, Louis-Henri Merino, Vero Estrada-Galiñanes, and Bryan Ford Decentralized Internet, Networks, Protocols, and Systems (DINPS) Bologna, Italy – July 10, 2022 Abstract: 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…
Invited talk at INRIA prospective seminar on Distributed Systems and Middleware July 6, 2022 – Rungis, France Slides: PDF
Bryan Ford Swiss Federal Chancellery – Independent examination of Swiss Post system 2021 Scopes 1, 2 and 3 Final Report – April 4, 2022 Abstract: Switzerland is one of the few countries globally that has a national program for electronic voting (E-voting), which has been evolving in several stages for well over a decade. For the past several years, the program’s most recent stage has focused on…
Ksandros Apostoli M.S. thesis advised by Simone Colombo and Bryan Ford March 22, 2022 Abstract Recent anonymous credential schemes present major advances in the way digital identities are treated, empowering users with fine-grained control over their personal data. While limiting the amount of user-data that is accessible to third parties paves the way to stronger privacy guarantees, it also leads…
Amogh Pradeep, Hira Javaid, Ryan Williams, Antoine Rault, David Choffnes, Stevens Le Blond, and Bryan Ford Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies March 16, 2022 Abstract: 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…
Invited talk at SI Summit 2022 February 17, 2022 – Virtual Slides: PDF
Kirill Nikitin Ph.D. thesis advised by Bryan Ford November 26, 2021 Abstract: Secure retrieval of data requires integrity, confidentially, transparency, and metadata-privacy of the process. Existing protection mechanisms, however, provide only partially these properties: encryption schemes still expose cleartext metadata, protocols for private information retrieval neglect data integrity, and…
Cristina Băsescu and Bryan Ford Twentieth ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets) November 10-12, 2021 Abstract: 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, and network…
Talk at Finance & Technology Conference 2021 on Crypto-assets and Asset Tokenization EPFL Center for Digital Trust (C4DT) November 5, 2021 – Lausanne, Switzerland Slides: PDF
Talk at Seminar 21431 – Rigorous Methods for Smart Contracts October 25, 2021 – Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany Slides: PDF
Distinguished Lecture at Vienna CyberSecurity and Privacy Research Cluster October 13, 2021 – Virtual Slides: PDF
David Jules Froelicher Ph.D. thesis advised by Jean-Pierre Hubaux and Bryan Ford October 1, 2021 Abstract: Analyzing and processing data that are siloed and dispersed among multiple distrustful stakeholders is difficult and can even become impossible when the data are sensitive or confidential. Current data-protection and privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR) highly restrict the sharing and outsourcing…
Ludovic Barman Ph.D. thesis advised by Jean-Pierre Hubaux and Bryan Ford September 17, 2021 Abstract: Most communication systems (e.g., e-mails, instant messengers, VPNs) use encryption to prevent third parties from learning sensitive information. However, encrypted communications protect the contents but often leak metadata: the amount of data sent and the time it was sent, the way the data…
Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Enis Ceyhun Alp, Linus Gasser, Philipp Jovanovic, Ewa Syta, and Bryan Ford 47th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2021) Copenhagen, Denmark – August 16-20, 2021 Abstract: Distributed ledgers provide high availability and integrity, making them a key enabler for practical and secure computation of distributed workloads among mutually…
Talk at IC3 Blockchain Summer Camp July 28, 2021 – Virtual Slides: PDF
Keynote at Internet of Humans Workshop #1 July 27, 2021 – Virtual Slides: PDF