Peer-to-Peer Systems and Blockchain

Year:

1st year

Semester:

Programme main editor:

I2CAT

Onsite in:

UBB

Remote:

CNAM

ECTS range:

5-7 ECTS

Professors

Laura Ricci

UNIPI

Sara Tucci

CNAM/CEA

Florin Craciun

UBB

Prerequisites:

Computer Networks.

At least one programming language.

Algorithmics.

Pedagogical objectives:

The student will acquire knowledge relative to the development of distributed systems, in particular of blockchain-based systems.

At the end of the course, the student

will be able to develop a distributed application.
will be able to develop a smart contract.

will be able to understand consensus mechanisms.

Evaluation modalities:

At the end of the course, the student must submit the final project to be evaluated.

Description:

The course covers the following topics:

Peer-to-peer Systems: general concepts, unstructured overlays: Flooding, Random Walks, Epidemic Diffusion, structured overlays: Distributed Hash Tables (DHT), Routing on a DHT, IPFS.
Blockchains: basic concepts, basic cryptographic tools (digital signatures, cryptographic hash, Zero-Knowledge,..), data structures: Merkle trees, Merkle Patricia tries.

Bitcoin: transaction and block structure. Mining : Proof of Work, rewards. Bitcoin: attacks, 51%, double spending. Bitcoin: tracciabilità e mixing. Structure of the P2P network.

Bizantine Fault-Tolerance (BFT) Consensus and BFT-based blockchains.
Ethereum: smart contract, gas. Consensus: from PoW to PoS. Ethereum: Solidity, smart contracts programming. Smart contract security and attacks.

Distributed Ledgers Applications: tokens (fungible and non-fungible), Self Sovereign Identity, Supply-chains.
Scalability enhancement: Zero Knowledge rollup e optimistic roll-up, side chain, inter-chain protocols, channel networks (Lightning network).

complementary content:

Peer to peer system: applications BitTorrent, a Content Distribution Network, implementation of the Kademlia DHT.

Required teaching material

Slides and didactic content published on the web site of the course.

Teaching volume:

lessons:

18-48 hours

Exercices:

Supervised lab:

0-14 hours

Project:

0-2 hours

Devices:

Laboratory-Based Course Structure

Open-Source Software Requirements