My main research interests are:
Blockchain is an emerging technology that is gaining an always in- creasing attention due to its fundamental properties like data integrity, fully decentralisation and transparency. While a lot of effort is currently in place on designing blockchain-based architecture, the massive integration of distributed ledgers in industrial applications strongly depends on the formal guaranties of the quality of services offered by these applications, especially in terms of con- sistency. Thus, investigating theoretical aspects of blockchains is fundamental to understand their possible limitations and how they can be solved.
Modern distributed systems are characterised by complex deployment designed to ensure high availability through replication and diversity, to tolerate the presence of failures and to limit the possibility of successful compromising. However, software is not free from bugs that generate vulnerabilities that could be exploited by an attacker through multiple steps. Ensuring the correct delivery of services and business continuity in presence of cyber attacks is paramount and far from being trivial due to the dynamic and evolving nature of attackers. Thus, defining adaptive models and methodologies to detect and respond to cyber attacks is of primary importance.
Fault tolerance is one of the main dependability attribute and it is fundamental to ensure availability of distributed systems and services. Behind the classical sense of fault tolerance, Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) received a lot of attention as it makes possible to ensure the correct function of the system despite arbitrary failures. BFT have been deeply studied for distributed system having a complete communication network and where entities remain confined to their original position. However, considering the recent trend toward mobile and pervasive computing, new challenges are arising such as mobility, collision, exposition to attackers etc., that force application developers to consider arbitrary failures. Thus, there is an emerging need for BFT solutions that are able to consider such new additional challenges.
Distributed systems are rapidly evolving, and the advent of new classes of applications and technologies, such as VANET, Airborne Networks, Social Networks, Smart Environments, P2P, broad area supercomputing, and distributed cloud services, is radically changing the way we think about them. Dynamic distributed systems have structures that are self-defined at any instant by entities that might autonomously decide to par- ticipate in the same distributed application. These systems are characterized by dynamic arrival and departure of participating entities and normally it may not be possible to assume anything about the universe of participants, their identities, capabilities, or reliability. Understanding the fundamentals of how to master this dynamic dimension is of primary importance to design of robust, dependable, and predictable distributed systems.