[Ilc] Talk announcement: Internet-Level Consensus is Practical

[David Mazieres <[e-mail]>]

I'll be giving the following 30-minute talk during the saag session at
the upcoming IETF meeting in Chicago, likely followed by a "bar bof" on
Internet-level consensus that evening.


		Internet-Level Consensus is Practical

			    David Mazières

		      Security Area Open Meeting
		 Thursday March 30, 2017 15:20-17:20
			    Zurich D room
				   
Consensus is the problem of agreeing on a valid input value among
members of a distributed system.  Internet-level consensus extends the
concept to global agreement, despite the fact that the Internet has no
meaningful notion of membership.  This talk will report on the Stellar
consensus protocol (SCP), an existence proof that secure consensus
does not require well-defined membership.  SCP's key idea is for
individual participants to decide for themselves which other
participants they cannot afford to diverge from.  SCP guarantees
agreement so long as there is transitive overlap in these
dependencies.  SCP is in production use by the Stellar payment
network, but has broader potential applications ranging from secure
package distribution to key management in end-to-end email encryption.