The Curious Engineer

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Distributed systems / cloudMathSecurity

Posts
289 from 1 Apr 1992 to 25 Oct 2026
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monthly (17 in the last year)
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personal blog
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https://bford.info/index.xml

2026 14

  1. Inductive Grounded Arithmetic: Goodstein, the Hydra, and Γ0
  2. Fact and Fiction in Grounded Set Theory
  3. Pub
  4. Idealizing Useful Fictions in Omega Grounded Arithmetic
  5. Internalized Truth in Reflective Grounded Arithmetic
  6. Computable Quantification in Reflective Grounded Arithmetic
  7. Formalizing Paradoxes in Grounded Arithmetic using Isabelle/HOL
  8. Democratic Voting in DAOs
  9. Grounded Verification of Recursive Trace Systems
  10. Thesis
  11. Inhabiting Kripke’s truth via a working paracomplete formal arithmetic
  12. PopNet project: history layer
  13. Limix: Limiting Lamport Exposure to Distant Failures in Globally-Managed Distributed Systems
  14. Paracomplete logic and the Aymara language

2025 11

  1. Votegral: Towards Usable, End-to-End Verifiable, Coercion-Resistant Online Voting
  2. TRIP: Coercion-Resistant Registration for E-Voting with Verifiability and Usability in Votegral
  3. Have a thing? Reasoning around recursion with dynamic typing in grounded arithmetic
  4. TRIP: Coercion-resistant Registration for E-Voting with Verifiability and Usability in Votegral
  5. Beyond voting: tool building for tool building for better democracy
  6. Coercion-resistant E-voting with in-person credentialing
  7. Formalizing Grounded Arithmetic atop Isabelle/Pure
  8. Exploring the Resolution of Delegations in Liquid Democracy with Fractional Delegation
  9. Robust and High-Performance Wide-Area Consensus Protocols
  10. Beyond the ratchet: practical challenges in secure messaging
  11. Coercion-Resistant E-voting and Proof of Personhood

2024 7

  1. Towards Real Democratic DAOs
  2. Reasoning Around Paradox with Grounded Deduction
  3. Towards practical and efficient performance robustness: QuePaxa and beyond
  4. E-Vote Your Conscience: Perceptions of Coercion and Vote Buying, and the Usability of Fake Credentials in Online Voting
  5. Can decentralized systems be truly “democratizing” – and how?
  6. ZeroAuction: Zero-Deposit Sealed-bid Auction via Delayed Execution
  7. Towards General-Purpose Decentralized Computing with Permissionless Extensibility

2023 6

  1. What Distributed Infrastructure Could Save the Planet?
  2. QuePaxa: Escaping the Tyranny of Timeouts in Consensus
  3. Authenticated Private Information Retrieval
  4. Building Strongly-Consistent Systems Resilient to Failures, Partitions, and Slowdowns
  5. Privacy-Preserving Personhood-Based Credentials
  6. Matchertext: an escape route from language-embedding hell?

2022 9

  1. Matchertext: Towards Verbatim Interlanguage Embedding
  2. MinML: concise but general markup syntax
  3. Toward Internet Performance Transparency
  4. Flash Freezing Flash Boys: Countering Blockchain Front-Running
  5. Who – Or What – Will Our Distributed Metaverse Serve?
  6. Auditing the Swiss Post E-voting System: An Architectural Perspective
  7. 3PBCS: A Privacy-Preserving, Personhood-Based Credential System
  8. Moby: A Blackout-Resistant Anonymity Network for Mobile Devices
  9. Digital Personhood: Towards Technology that Securely Serves People

2021 11

  1. Integrity and Metadata Protection in Data Retrieval
  2. Immunizing Systems from Distant Failures by Limiting Lamport Exposure
  3. Decentralized Finance: for the few, the many, or everyone?
  4. Consensus for Decentralized Ledgers
  5. Digital Personhood: Towards Technology that Securely Serves People
  6. Privacy-Preserving Federated Analytics using Multiparty Homomorphic Encryption
  7. Analyzing and Protecting Communication Metadata
  8. CALYPSO: Private Data Management for Decentralized Ledgers
  9. Votegral: Coercion-Resistant E-voting Without Trusted Hardware
  10. Proof of Personhood: Introduction and Challenges
  11. Technologizing Democracy or Democratizing Technology? A Layered-Architecture Perspective on Potentials and Challenges

2020 11

  1. AI for Governance Belongs in Mechanism, Not Policy
  2. Personhood Online: Privacy, Transparency, and Inclusion for Digital Democracy
  3. Identity and Personhood in Digital Democracy: Evaluating Inclusion, Equality, Security, and Privacy in Pseudonym Parties and Other Proofs of Personhood
  4. Distributed Randomness
  5. Design choices for Central Bank Digital Currency
  6. PriFi: Low-Latency Anonymity for Organizational Networks
  7. Que Sera Consensus: Simple Asynchronous Agreement with Private Coins and Threshold Logical Clocks
  8. Blockchain: Between Hype and Reality
  9. Blockchain, Privacy, and Accountability
  10. Digital Architecture for Trust in the 21st Century
  11. Voting and Blockchain: Promise and Challenges

2019 12

  1. Secure, Confidential Blockchains Providing High Throughput and Low Latency
  2. Rationality is Self-Defeating in Permissionless Systems
  3. Are Only Type Parameters Generic Enough for Go 2 Generics?
  4. Reducing Metadata Leakage from Encrypted Files and Communication with PURBs
  5. Threshold Logical Clocks for Asynchronous Distributed Coordination and Consensus
  6. On the Security of Two-Round Multi-Signatures
  7. Rethinking General-Purpose Decentralized Computing
  8. MorphIT: Morphing Packet Reports for Internet Transparency
  9. MedChain: Accountable and Auditable Data Sharing in Distributed Medical Scenarios
  10. The Remote Voting Minefield: from North Carolina to Switzerland
  11. Rethinking Priorities: Should Identity Systems Divide or Unite People?
  12. Are Biometrics a Good Test for Real Unique Personhood?

2018 8

  1. A Liquid Perspective on Democratic Choice
  2. So They're Selling You a Blockchain
  3. MedCo: Enabling Secure and Privacy-Conscious Exploration of Distributed Clinical and Genomic Data
  4. International Scientific Conferences Must Leave the U.S.
  5. Sightseeing Around Lausanne
  6. Democratic Value and Money for Decentralized Digital Society
  7. OmniLedger: A Secure, Scale-Out, Decentralized Ledger via Sharding
  8. On Enforcing the Digital Immunity of a Large Humanitarian Organization

2017 9

  1. Secure, Scalable Proof-of-Stake Blockchains
  2. Atom: Horizontally Scaling Strong Anonymity
  3. CHAINIAC: Proactive Software-Update Transparency via Collectively Signed Skipchains and Verified Builds
  4. How Do You Know It's On the Blockchain? With a SkipChain.
  5. UnLynx: A Decentralized System for Privacy-Conscious Data Sharing
  6. Technology Governs Us. Will it Govern Us Well?
  7. Scalable Bias-Resistant Distributed Randomness
  8. Proof-of-Personhood: Redemocratizing Permissionless Cryptocurrencies
  9. Multiple Objectives of Lawful-Surveillance Protocols

2016 14

  1. Selfish Mining in Bitcoin and ByzCoin
  2. Untangling Mining Incentives in Bitcoin and ByzCoin
  3. Privacy-Preserving Lawful Contact Chaining
  4. Enhancing Bitcoin Security and Performance with Strong Consistency via Collective Signing
  5. Riffle: An Efficient Communication System With Strong Anonymity
  6. Open, privacy-preserving protocols for lawful surveillance
  7. Keeping Authorities “Honest or Bust” with Decentralized Witness Cosigning
  8. AnonRep: Towards Tracking-Resistant Anonymous Reputation
  9. Building Privacy-Preserving Cryptographic Credentials from Federated Online Identities
  10. Apple, FBI, and Software Transparency
  11. An advanced crypto library for Go
  12. Backdoors, Trusted Servers, and Deanonymization
  13. How to prove DNSSEC isn't a key escrow scheme
  14. Metadata Protection Considerations for TLS Present and Future

2015 10

  1. Collectively Witnessing Log Servers in CT
  2. Let's verify real people, not real names.
  3. Deterministically Deterring Timing Attacks in Deterland
  4. Seeking Anonymity in an Internet Panopticon
  5. A Flexible Architecture for Structural Reliability Auditing to the Clouds
  6. Identity Management through Privacy-Preserving Authentication
  7. Warding off Timing Channels in Deterland
  8. Private Eyes: Secure Remote Biometric Authentication
  9. Certificate Cothority: Towards Trustworthy Collective CAs
  10. Building Privacy-Preserving Cryptographic Credentials from Federated Online Identities

2014 12

  1. GPUfs: The Case for Operating System Services on GPUs
  2. Delegative Democracy Revisited
  3. Faculty size and growth in the top 20 Computer Science departments
  4. Open Surveillance
  5. Heading Off Correlated Failures through Independence-as-a-Service
  6. Catching Bandits and Only Bandits: Privacy-Preserving Intersection Warrants for Lawful Surveillance
  7. Managing NymBoxes for Identity and Tracking Protection
  8. Security Analysis of Accountable Anonymity in Dissent
  9. A TorPath to TorCoin: Proof-of-Bandwidth Altcoins for Compensating Relays
  10. From Onions to Shallots: Rewarding Tor Relays with TEARS
  11. TAQ: Enhancing Fairness and Performance Predictability in Small Packet Regimes
  12. A Wire-Compatible TCP Implementation for Low-Latency Applications

2013 12

  1. Crypto-Book: An Architecture for Privacy Preserving Online Identities
  2. Structural Cloud Audits that Protect Private Information
  3. Conscript Your Friends into Larger Anonymity Sets with JavaScript
  4. Ensuring High-Quality Randomness in Cryptographic Key Generation
  5. Hang With Your Buddies to Resist Intersection Attacks
  6. An Untold Story of Redundant Clouds: Making Your Service Deployment Truly Reliable
  7. Proactively Accountable Anonymous Messaging in Verdict
  8. Maple: Simplifying SDN Programming Using Algorithmic Policies
  9. Reducing Latency in Tor Circuits with Unordered Delivery
  10. Lazy Tree Mapping: Generalizing and Scaling Deterministic Parallelism
  11. Welcome to the World of Human Rights: Please Make Yourself Uncomfortable
  12. GPUfs: Integrating a File System with GPUs

2012 12

  1. Enhancing the OS against Security Threats in System Administration
  2. Dissent in Numbers: Making Strong Anonymity Scale
  3. Deterministic OpenMP
  4. Scavenging for Anonymity with BlogDrop
  5. Scaling Software-Defined Network Controllers on Multicore Servers
  6. Non-Linear Compression: Gzip Me Not!
  7. Plugging Side-Channel Leaks with Timing Information Flow Control
  8. Icebergs in the Clouds: the Other Risks of Cloud Computing
  9. Strong Theft-Proof Privacy-Preserving Biometric Authentication
  10. Fitting Square Pegs Through Round Pipes: Unordered Delivery Wire-Compatible with TCP and TLS
  11. Faceless: Decentralized Anonymous Group Messaging for Online Social Networks
  12. Scalable Anonymous Group Communication in the Anytrust Model

2011 5

  1. A Virtual Memory Foundation for Scalable Deterministic Parallelism
  2. CertiKOS: A Certified Kernel for Secure Cloud Computing
  3. Eyo: Device-Transparent Personal Storage
  4. Deterministic OpenMP for Race-Free Parallelism
  5. Workspace Consistency: A Programming Model for Shared Memory Parallelism

2010 7

  1. A Dynamic Recursive Unified Internet Design (DRUID)
  2. Minion: an all-terrain packet packhorse to jump-start stalled internet transports
  3. Determinating Timing Channels in Compute Clouds
  4. Efficient System-Enforced Deterministic Parallelism
  5. Dissent: Accountable Anonymous Group Messaging
  6. Advanced Development of Certified OS Kernels
  7. Unintended Consequences of NAT Deployments with Overlapping Address Space

2009 3

  1. Efficient Cross-Layer Negotiation
  2. Device Transparency: a New Model for Mobile Storage
  3. NAT Behavioral Requirements for ICMP

2008 7

  1. Breaking Up the Transport Logjam
  2. NAT Behavioral Requirements for TCP
  3. UIA: A Global Connectivity Architecture for Mobile Personal Devices
  4. UIA: A Global Connectivity Architecture for Mobile Personal Devices
  5. Vx32: Lightweight User-level Sandboxing on the x86
  6. An Offline Foundation for Online Accountable Pseudonyms
  7. State of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Communication across Network Address Translators (NATs)

2007 3

  1. Directions in Internet Transport Evolution
  2. Alpaca: Extensible Authorization for Distributed Services
  3. Structured Streams: a New Transport Abstraction

2006 4

  1. – Bryan Ford's Home Page
  2. Persistent Personal Names for Globally Connected Mobile Devices
  3. Sybil Parties: An Offline Foundation for Online Accountability
  4. User-Relative Names for Globally Connected Personal Devices

2005 5

  1. VXA: A Virtual Architecture for Durable Compressed Archives
  2. Peer-to-Peer Communication Across Network Address Translators
  3. – Bryan Ford's Home Page
  4. Application Design Guidelines for Traversal through Network Address Translators
  5. Operating Principles and General Behavioral Requirements for Network Address Translators (BEH-GEN)

2004 4

  1. Individual Representation
  2. Wiki Democracy
  3. Cache Directory Tagging Specification
  4. Parsing Expression Grammars: A Recognition-Based Syntactic Foundation

2003 4

  1. Unmanaged Internet Protocol: Taming the Edge Network Management Crisis
  2. Scalable Internet Routing on Topology-Independent Node Identities
  3. Fx86: Functional Management of Imperative Virtual Machines
  4. Service Duality - Vitalizing the Commons

2002 5

  1. Delegative Voting
  2. Packrat Parsing: Simple, Powerful, Lazy, Linear Time
  3. Packrat Parsing: a Practical Linear-Time Algorithm with Backtracking
  4. Packrat Parsing: a Practical Linear-Time Algorithm with Backtracking
  5. Delegative Democracy

2001 64

  1. Introduction: Promise, Failures, and Future of Self-Organizing Technologies
  2. A Layered Architecture Perspective on Self-Organizing Technologies
  3. Identity, Personhood, and Citizenship in the Digital Age
  4. Economic Empowerment and Inclusion: Money and Wealth in Digital Democracy
  5. Speech and Association: Privacy, Accountability, and Freedoms in Digital Communications
  6. Filtering, Curating, and Rewarding Value and Expertise in the Digital Information Deluge
  7. A Liquid Perspective on Social Choice for Digital Democracy
  8. – Bryan Ford's Home Page
  9. – Bryan Ford's Home Page Vx32: Lightweight, User-level Sandboxing on the x86
  10. – Bryan Ford's Home Page
  11. 0717 Aachen
  12. Antelope Island
  13. Avignon
  14. Bar Harbor, Maine
  15. Barcelona
  16. 0820 Berlin
  17. Binary Encoded Schematic Objects (BESO)
  18. 0709 Bonn
  19. Bryan's Family
  20. Bryan's Home in Cambridge
  21. Cologne
  22. Composable Markup (CMark)
  23. Composable Math Markup (CMath)
  24. Composable Text Markup Language (CTML)
  25. Composable Text Syntax
  26. Decentralized Update Governance (DUG)
  27. Delimited Text and Binary Syntax
  28. Distributed randomness, drand, and the League of Entropy
  29. Dresden
  30. Efficient Stream Embedding with Composable Binary Encoding (CBE)
  31. Escaping Escaping Hell with Matchertext Resource Identifiers
  32. eXtensible Syntax Object Notation (XSON)
  33. Flowers in Lausanne
  34. 0617 Geneva
  35. JSON Binary Schema
  36. Lagoon
  37. Lake Louise
  38. Magnitudes: When an Integer is Too Precise
  39. Marseille
  40. MaxML: Matchertext-friendly XML Syntax
  41. Midsummer's Eve at Zebediah's
  42. My Cats
  43. Opus '99
  44. 0801 Paris
  45. Peterhof
  46. Piano
  47. Rethinking Social Media to Escape the Echo Chamber
  48. 1225 Rome
  49. Rwanda
  50. Saint Petersburg
  51. Secure, Scalable Proof-of-Stake Blockchains
  52. South Korea
  53. Spring 2002
  54. Stata Center
  55. Tornado
  56. Travels
  57. Trip to Hawaii, October 1999
  58. Utah Travels
  59. 0116 Venice
  60. Vermont
  61. 0626 Vienna
  62. Villars, Switzerland
  63. VIPcode: Encoding and Decoding Structured Data with Verifiable Interface Presentations (VIPs)
  64. XTAX: an Extensible Sytntax Metalanguage

1999 1

  1. Interface and Execution Models in the Fluke Kernel

1997 3

  1. The Flux OSKit: A Substrate for Kernel and Language Research
  2. Flick: A Flexible, Optimizing IDL Compiler
  3. The Flux OS Toolkit: Reusable Components for OS Implementation

1996 4

  1. CPU Inheritance Scheduling
  2. Microkernels Meet Recursive Virtual Machines
  3. User-level Checkpointing Through Exportable Kernel State
  4. The Persistent Relevance of the Local Operating System to Global Applications

1995 1

  1. Using Annotated Interface Definitions to Optimize RPC

1994 2

  1. Separating Presentation from Interface in RPC and IDLs
  2. Evolving Mach 3.0 to A Migrating Thread Model

1993 4

  1. Microkernels Should Support Passive Objects
  2. FLEX: A Tool for Building Efficient and Flexible Systems
  3. In-Kernel Servers on Mach 3.0: Implementation and Performance
  4. Notes on Thread Models in Mach 3.0

1992 2

  1. Die Datenpresse
  2. Object-Oriented Display Refreshing

Undated 3

  1. Album
  2. Funny
  3. Old Projects