Context

The PriCLeSS project establishes a cross-disciplinary partnership to understand the legal challenges and address the technicalobstacles associated with data storage in a blockchain context.

From a technical perspective, the project focuses on designing algorithmic responses to the legal issues that arise when using blockchain technology to handle personal data.

In this context we first proposed Splitchain, a novel fully decentralized state-sharding solution that does not require the maintenance of a synchronization blockchain or any heavy synchronization mechanisms, allowing shards to progress at their own pace in a non-blocking manner. Then, we augmented SplitChain with the ability to enforce geographical or administrative constraints in the placement of data thereby addressing some of the requirements of privacy legislation like the GDPR. We refer to this augmented version as SplitChain2.

Assignment

This engineering position involves implementing first SplitChain and then SplitChain2. In this task the engineer will be guided by the team who have been working on SplitChain and SplitChain2 consisting of Antoine Rault, Davide Frey and Emmanuelle Anceaume from Inria, and Damien Franchi and Sandrine Turgis from the IODE Team at the University of Rennes. The engineer will also have the opportunity to collaborate with other partners from the PriCLeSS project.

Main activities

The engineer will follow the following approximate timeline.

-M1-M2: Analysis of the state of the art:

• Sharding and Proof-of-Eligibility consensus implementations.
• Research paper on SplitChain
• Current working Draft on SplitChain2

-M3: High-level design of the implementation.

-M5: Single shard implementation, with features for multiple shards and privacy (indirection, encryption, etc.).

-M8: Hypercube routing for inter-shard communication.

-M12: Prototype implementation of the complete system.

Technical skills:

• Proficiency in Rust or willingness to learn the language and use it
• At least basic terminal usage: bash or other environments
• Familiarity with git

Non technical skills:

• Fluent written and spoken English
• French can be a plus
• Ability to work in a team
• Flexibility
• Planning and ability to meet deadlines

Benefits package

• Possibility of telecommuting and flexible working hours
• 7 weeks vacation + 10 days RTT
• Subsidized meals
• Social, cultural and sports benefits

As part of its diversity policy, all positions at the Institute are open to people with disabilities.