Roadmap

This roadmap defines the scope of our work within the Priviledge project as well as integration points with other parts of the Cardano project (both research and development). Our roadmap revolves among three main topics:

1. Priviledge deliverables: build a prototype that incorporates the bulk of the current research results on decentralized software updates, and validate the prototype. This will allow us to fulfill the core requirements for the Priviledge project.

2. Network and consensus : provide a networked version of the prototype along with a basic ledger consensus mechanism. The reason is to test the prototype in a networked environment.

3. Delegation and treasury : enhance the prototype from the previous phase by introducing delegation to expert pools for the participation in the software update protocol and by integrating, as much as possible, with the research results of the treasury system. Note that the there is an identified overlap of our work with the treasury system at the level of the Ideation phase in the software update lifecycle.

At the moment there are two research tracks that run in parallel with the implementation work carried out in this repository:

• Integration with the treasury system. Common approaches for on-chain governance like voting and the delegation to experts will be identified and research proposals will be integrated. Other open issues such as an incentive scheme to support the delegation will be jointly worked.

• Secure activation of updates based on a weaker set of assumptions (not requiring the updated ledger to have the same common-prefix and chain-growth parameters as the original one)

As the reseach progresses we will incorporate its result into our prototype, and conversely, inform the reserachers of any insight gained during the prototyping phase.

Milestones

1. ✔️ Decentralized Software Updates for Stake Based Ledger Systems - Submit research paper on FC20

2. ✔️ Benchmark hedgehog generators and compare them with QuickCheck ones. Required to reach a decision on how to test our prototype.

3. ✔️ Implement Ideation phase

4. ✔️ Define properties of the Ideation phase

5. ✔️ Proof-of-Concept for testing via Abstract State Machines.

6. ✔️Test properties of the Ideation phase.

7. ✔️ Write a formal spec/design document - Ideation Phase

8. ✔️ Prototype integration with consensus as a preparatory investigative task for iteration 2

9. ✔️ Write paper on update mechanism

   1. ✔️ Perform in-depth related work analysis

   2. ✔️ Revise software updates paper based on comments and enhance with experimental results

   3. ✔️ Perform experimental evaluation for the paper

   4. ✔️ Submit a paper to Esorics 2020 or ACM CCS 2020

10. ✔️ Write an informal specification of the activation phase.

11. ✔️Implement Approval phase

12. ✔️ Implement Activation phase

13. ✔️ Design new approach to property test the update mechanism

14. ✔️ Define and test basic liveness properties

15. ✔️ Define and test basic safety properties

16. ✔️ Write validation criteria for the prototype (D1.2 validation criteria (M30))

    • Define all the ledger properties we want to test.
    • Define the validation criteria for the integration.

17. ✔️ Integrate the prototype with Cardano

18. 🔨 Unify all the papers and deliverables in a design document.

19. ✔️ Perform validation of the integrated prototype, as defined in D1.2

20. ✔️ Write final report on architecture (D4.3 Final Report on Architecture (M30))

21. 🔨 Write final report on validation criteria testing results (D1.3 Use Case Validation (M36))

22. 🔨 Write final report on prototype implementation (D4.4 Report on Tools for Secure Ledger Systems (M36))

Nice to haves

1. ✔️ Present the update mechanism to other IOHK stakeholders

2. Incorporate delegation and treasury