This practical new book offers the distributed-computing fundamental knowledge for individuals to connect with one another in a more secure and efficient way than with traditional blockchains. These new forms of secure, scalable blockchains promise to replace centralized institutions to connect individuals without the risks of user manipulations or data extortions. The techniques taught herein consist of enhancing blockchain security and making blockchain scalable by relying on the observation that no blockchain can exist without solving the consensus problem. First, the state-of-the-art of consensus protocols are analyzed, hence motivating the need for a new family of consensus protocols offering strong (deterministic) guarantees. Second, a didactic series of classic blockchain vulnerabilities is presented to illustrate the importance of novel designs better suited for the adversarial environment of open networks. These cutting-edge solutions are illustrated through the Redbelly blockchain design, which solves a different problem from the classic Byzantine consensus problem of 1982 and which delivers-in the modern blockchain context-high performance at large scale. Topics and features: Covers the combination of security and distributed computing to devise the new generation of blockchains Shows how blockchain has shed new light on decades of research in distributed systems Provides instruction on the security needed by the industry to use blockchains in production Explains didactically the necessary ingredients to make blockchain efficient at large scale Helps fill the gap of knowledge in the highly demanded blockchain sector This unique volume contains the building blocks to design secure and scalable blockchains. As such, it is dedicated to developers, application designers, and computer scientists and requires only a minimal undergraduate level in mathematics and computer science. Vincent Gramoli is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the University of Sydney and the Chief Technology Officer of Redbelly Network. He teaches the Blockchain Scalability course on Coursera.

This book constitutes the revised selected papers of the First International Conference on Networked Systems, NETYS 2013, held in Marrakech, Morocco, in May 2013. The 33 papers (17 regular and 16 short papers) presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 74 submissions. They address major topics from theory and practice of networked systems: multi-core architectures, middleware, environments, storage clusters, as well as peer-to-peer, sensor, wireless, and mobile networks.

This practical new book offers the distributed-computing fundamental knowledge for individuals to connect with one another in a more secure and efficient way than with traditional blockchains. These new forms of secure, scalable blockchains promise to replace centralized institutions to connect individuals without the risks of user manipulations or data extortions. The techniques taught herein consist of enhancing blockchain security and making blockchain scalable by relying on the observation that no blockchain can exist without solving the consensus problem. First, the state-of-the-art of consensus protocols are analyzed, hence motivating the need for a new family of consensus protocols offering strong (deterministic) guarantees. Second, a didactic series of classic blockchain vulnerabilities is presented to illustrate the importance of novel designs better suited for the adversarial environment of open networks. These cutting-edge solutions are illustrated through the Redbelly blockchain design, which solves a different problem from the classic Byzantine consensus problem of 1982 and which delivers—in the modern blockchain context—high performance at large scale. Topics and features: Covers the combination of security and distributed computing to devise the new generation of blockchains Shows how blockchain has shed new light on decades of research in distributed systems Provides instruction on the security needed by the industry to use blockchains in production Explains didactically the necessary ingredients to make blockchain efficient at large scale Helps fill the gap of knowledge in the highly demanded blockchain sector This unique volume contains the building blocks to design secure and scalable blockchains. As such, it is dedicated to developers, application designers, and computer scientists and requires only a minimal undergraduate level in mathematics and computer science. Vincent Gramoli is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the University of Sydney and the Chief Technology Officer of Redbelly Network. He teaches the Blockchain Scalability course on Coursera.

Providing a shared memory abstraction in distributed systems is a powerful tool that can simplify the design and implementation of software systems for networked platforms. This enables the system designers to work with abstract readable and writable objects without the need to deal with the complexity and dynamism of the underlying platform. The key property of shared memory implementations is the consistency guarantee that it provides under concurrent access to the shared objects. The most intuitive memory consistency model is atomicity because of its equivalence with a memory system where accesses occur serially, one at a time. Emulations of shared atomic memory in distributed systems is an active area of research and development. The problem proves to be challenging, and especially so in distributed message passing settings with unreliable components, as is often the case in networked systems. We present several approaches to implementing shared memory services with the help of replication on top of message-passing distributed platforms subject to a variety of perturbations in the computing medium.