arXiv subjects

Zhuolun Li

Publications and source records attributed to Zhuolun Li.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

SoK: Consensus for Fair Message Ordering

Distributed ledgers rely on consensus protocols to commit messages in an agreed order. In practice, this order is often chosen for profit, which raises fairness concerns. For example, in decentralized finance, nodes exploit transaction order to extract Maximal Extractable Value (MEV). This paper systematizes the mechanisms at the consensus layer that constrain message ordering in Byzantine fault tolerant systems. We decompose adversarial behavior into three capabilities that affect ordering and analyze each ordering family against them. We organize existing work into FIFO, random, and blind ordering, and compare the metadata and assumptions each requires. We also introduce a new formalization, the $f$-Robust Median Order, which exposes a gap in existing fairness definitions based on timestamps. Finally, we describe a reusable pattern for adding fair ordering to existing BFT consensus protocols. For the protocols we analyze, fair ordering costs 1.5 to 18 times the communication of vanilla consensus, and ordering computation varies by up to five orders of magnitude across families.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

Resilient Liquid Democracy: Mitigating Voting Power Imbalances via Secure Delegation Networks

Liquid democracy lets voters either vote directly or delegate their voting power to a trusted participant. Existing deployments make delegations publicly visible as they form, which invites popularity-driven herding, makes coercion verifiable, and leaves the election fragile when highly backed delegates abstain. We propose a liquid democracy mechanism that removes these vulnerabilities while keeping the tally fully auditable. Delegation choices are sealed with decentralized timed-release encryption while they are being formed and revealed in full for tallying, and each voter names ranked backup delegates together with a personal fallback ballot so that delegate failures do not silence them. We prove pre-reveal secrecy and resubmission receipt-freeness for the formation phase. Experiments grounded in real voting data show that the mechanism keeps voting power dispersed where transparent formation concentrates it into few hands, keeps outcomes stable under herding where transparent outcomes become a lottery on arrival order, and cuts vote loss under targeted delegate failures from 26% to about 3%. The experiments further characterize when delegation improves representational accuracy, namely when abstention is large, unrepresentative, and widely converted into delegation, giving deployments a concrete condition to assess.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Are Voters Willing to Collectively Secure Elections? Unraveling a Practical Blockchain Voting System

Ensuring ballot secrecy is critical for fair and trustworthy electronic voting systems, yet achieving strong secrecy guarantees in decentralized, large-scale elections remains challenging. This paper proposes the concept of collectively secure voting, in which voters themselves can opt in as secret holders to protect ballot secrecy. A practical blockchain-based collectively secure voting system is designed and implemented. Our design strikes a balance between strong confidentiality guarantees and real-world applicability. The proposed system combines threshold cryptography and smart contracts to ensure ballots remain confidential during voting, while all protocol steps remain transparent and verifiable. Voters can use the system without prior blockchain knowledge through an intuitive user interface that hides underlying complexity. To evaluate this approach, a user testing is conducted. Results show a high willingness to act as secret holders, reliable participation in share release, and high security confidence in the proposed system. The findings demonstrate that voters can collectively maintain secrecy and that such a practical deployment is feasible.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Blockchain and Edge Computing Nexus: A Large-scale Systematic Literature Review

Blockchain and edge computing are two instrumental paradigms of decentralized computation, driving key advancements in Smart Cities applications such as supply chain, energy and mobility. Despite their unprecedented impact on society, they remain significantly fragmented as technologies and research areas, while they share fundamental principles of distributed systems and domains of applicability. This paper introduces a novel and large-scale systematic literature review on the nexus of blockchain and edge computing with the aim to unravel a new understanding of how the interfacing of the two computing paradigms can boost innovation to provide solutions to timely but also long-standing research challenges. By collecting almost 6000 papers from 3 databases and putting under scrutiny almost 1000 papers, we build a novel taxonomy and classification consisting of 22 features with 287 attributes that we study using quantitative and machine learning methods. They cover a broad spectrum of technological, design, epistemological and sustainability aspects. Results reveal 4 distinguishing patterns of interplay between blockchain and edge computing with key determinants the public (permissionless) vs. private (permissioned) design, technology and proof of concepts. They also demonstrate the prevalence of blockchain-assisted edge computing for improving privacy and security, in particular for mobile computing applications.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

Send Message to the Future? Blockchain-based Time Machines for Decentralized Reveal of Locked Information

Conditional information reveal systems automate the release of information upon meeting specific predefined conditions, such as time or location. This paper introduces a breakthrough in the understanding, design, and application of conditional information reveal systems that are highly secure and decentralized. By designing a new practical timed-release cryptography system and a secret sharing scheme with reveal-verifiability, a novel data sharing system is devised on the blockchain that "sends messages in the future" with highly accurate decryption times. Notably, the proposed secret sharing scheme applies to other applications requiring verifiability of revealed secret shares. This paper provides a complete evaluation portfolio of this pioneering paradigm, including analytical results, a validation of its robustness in the Tamarin Prover and a performance evaluation of a real-world, open-source system prototype deployed across the globe. Using real-world election data, we also demonstrate the applicability of this innovative system in e-voting, illustrating its capacity to secure and ensure fair electronic voting processes.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Performance of EdDSA and BLS Signatures in Committee-Based Consensus

We present the first performance comparison of EdDSA and BLS signatures in committee-based consensus protocols through large-scale geo-distributed benchmarks. Contrary to popular beliefs, we find that small deployments (less than 40 validators) can benefit from the small storage footprint of BLS multi-signatures while larger deployments should favor EdDSA to improve performance. As an independent contribution, we present a novel way for committee-based consensus protocols to verify BLS multi-signed certificates by manipulating the aggregated public key using pre-computed values.

cs.DC↗