Industry-Grade Self-Sovereign Identity: On the Realisation of a Fully Distributed Self-Sovereign Identity Architecture

This research has been performed in pursuit of the MSc Computer Science at Delft University of Technology in collaboration with the Dutch National Office for Identity Data (RvIG), part of the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations. Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) is a relatively new concept part of a movement aspiring to create a...

Keep your enemies closer and be loud about it

Under what conditions can cooperation emerge and how can we sustain it? We build a computer simulation of a multi-agent spatial environment using Prisoner’s Dilemma as the principal agent interaction. We expand the model by allowing agents to remember a fixed number of past defectors and abstain from interacting with them again. Agents will be...

Sharing (mis) information on social networking sites. An exploration of the norms for distributing content authored by others

This article explores the norms that govern regular users’ acts of sharing content on social networking sites. Many debates on how to counteract misinformation on Social Networking Sites focus on the epistemic norms of testimony, implicitly assuming that the users’ acts of sharing should fall under the same norms as those for posting original...

Gossip as a Burdened Virtue

Gossip is often serious business, not idle chitchat. Gossip allows those oppressed to privately name their oppressors as a warning to others. Of course, gossip can be in error. The speaker may be lying or merely have lacked sufficient evidence. Bias can also make those who hear the gossip more or less likely to believe the gossip. By...

Epidemic Processes on Complex Networks: Modelling, Simulation and Algorithms

Local interactions on a graph will lead to global dynamic behaviour. In this thesis we focus on two types of dynamic processes on graphs: the Susceptible-Infected-Susceptilbe (SIS) virus spreading model, and gossip style epidemic algorithms. The largest part of this thesis is devoted to the SIS model. We first introduce the SIS model in chapter...

Computing in Large-Scale Dynamic Systems

Software applications developed for large-scale systems have always been difficult to de- velop due to problems caused by the large number of computing devices involved. Above a certain network size (roughly one hundred), necessary services such as code updating, topol- ogy discovery and data dissemination are challenging to operate and thus...

Distributed Kalman filtering using Broadcast Gossip

For many processes it is required to have a reliable view of an environment of interest. One way to achieve this is by performing a distributed Kalman filter. In this thesis, three distribution methods from different research backgrounds are implemented and evaluated using multiple metrics for use in a Gossip based wireless sensor network:...

Hearsay: Suppressing spam using trust in mobile social gossiping networks

The development of social networks has changed the way we communicate from a personal conversation into a broadcast with a world-wide audience. Social networks have proven themselves useful during protests and natural disasters by providing a platform to share ideas and offer help to those in need. However, due to the reliance on the Internet...

Gossip-based counting in dynamic networks

We propose Gossipico, a gossip algorithm to average, sum or find minima and maxima over node values in a large, distributed, and dynamic network. Unlike previous work, Gossipico provides a continuous estimate of, for example, the number of nodes, even when the network becomes disconnected. Gossipico converges quickly due to the introduction of a...

Tribler-G: A Decentralized Social Network for Playing Chess Online

There are currently many systems that offer online board games, for instance, social networking sites, where board games enjoy enormous popularity, but also systems such as the Internet Chess Club, which has been around for over a decade. However, these systems are all centralized and typically have drawbacks for the user, such as subscription...

Splash: Data synchronization in unmanaged, untrusted peer-to-peer networks

Peer-to-peer networks rely on gossip algorithms to spread information about the peer activity and the network status. State-of-the-art gossip algorithms are not sufficient to spread the information widely, as the size and the complexity of the unmanaged networks grow. They suffer from high bandwidth utilization and lack mechanisms to verify the...

Distributed G-MAC: A flexible MAC protocol for servicing Gossip Algorithms

A wireless sensor network is an embedded computer network formed by small cheap devices, prone to errors. Communication in such a network in a single-hop range is provided by a Medium Access Control (MAC) Protocol. Chess has developed one such a MAC protocol, Gossip-MAC (G-MAC), specifically designed to service gossiping-based traffic. G-MAC was...