# Alex Vlasov's Research Topics 2020

# Short term

- Time in Ethereum2.0
- Time requirements
- Clock Synchronization Protocol
- NTP attacks, implications, countermeasures
- Hybrid security models
- composite protocols (e.g. beacon chain protocol depends on libp2p, topic/node discovery, clock synchronization assumption)
- security models to account for multiple risk factors: time attacks, system dynamics, correlated faults, entropy, Sybil attacks
- Ethereum Threats Model - how real faults map to the model(s) above

# Mid term

- Network-level protocol analysis (Sybil attacks, safety/liveness properties in Byzantine context)
- topics discovery
- libp2p
- node membership/discovery
- Safety attacks on Casper-FFG-based systems
- Validator-node gap (a validator is a first class citizen in beacon chain, but a node is the real actor on the network layer)
- Scalability vs BFT tradeoff (e.g. limited bandwidth can lead to multiple faults from synchronous model's persepective)

# Long term
- proofs and papers for the above
- exploring Eth2 phase 2 topics
- Formal (machine-checkable) proofs:
- Executable spec of beacon chain protocol in a language, more amenable to a formal analysis
- Optimizations (state transition, fork choice) with proofs of correctness
- Translation from the formal spec (and optimized algos) to various languages