Dr. Christian Berger

Appointments by prior arrangement.

Research

My research addresses Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) in distributed systems: How can a system keep operating reliably despite failures and targeted malicious behavior, while preserving consistency and progress at high performance and scale? To answer this, I design and analyze consensus and replication protocols, and evaluate them through large-scale simulations and targeted fault injection.

• Byzantine fault tolerance and state machine replication
• Consensus algorithms
• Blockchain systems, distributed ledger technology, and decentralized finance (DeFi)
• Performance evaluation through network simulation and fault injection

Bio

I received my Bachelor’s (2014) and Master’s (2017) degrees in Computer Science from the University of Passau, Germany. From 2018 to 2019, I worked as an IT consultant at msg systems AG. In 2019, I joined the Chair of Security in Information Systems at the University of Passau as a research associate and PhD candidate under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Hans P. Reiser, where I worked in the research projects SORRIR and BFT2Chain. In 2024, I completed my doctorate (Dr. rer. nat., summa cum laude) with the thesis “Towards Fast and Adaptive Byzantine State Machine Replication for Planetary-Scale Systems”. Since January 2025, I have been a postdoctoral researcher (Akademischer Rat) at the Chair of System Software (Informatik 4) at FAU, led by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rüdiger Kapitza.

Awards

• Best Paper Runner-up, Middleware 2024 – for “Chasing Lightspeed Consensus: Fast Wide-Area Byzantine Replication with Mercury”
• Distinguished Paper Award, EDCC 2022 – for “Automatic Integration of BFT State-Machine Replication into IoT Systems”
• Prof. C.V. Ramamoorthy Best Paper Award, SRDS 2021 – for “Making Reads in BFT State Machine Replication Fast, Linearizable, and Live”
• Best Paper Candidate, SRDS 2019 – for “Resilient Wide-Area Byzantine Consensus Using Adaptive Weighted Replication”
• Teaching evaluation certificate of the Faculty of Engineering, FAU – 3rd place (of 13) in the seminar category, summer semester 2025

Research Projects

• NEMESIS – A Novel Evaluation Platform for Measuring Endurance of Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Systems under Injected Stressors
  DFG, October 2026 – September 2029 · Role: principal investigator
• BFT2Chain – Design and Validation of Scalable Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Consensus Algorithms for Blockchains
  DFG, 2021–2026, joint project of FAU and the University of Passau · Role: contributed to the proposal; researcher, later research lead
• SORRIR – A Self-Organizing, Resilient Execution Platform for IoT Services
  BMBF, 2019–2022 · Role: researcher, lead of major work packages

Teaching

• Winter semester 2026/27: Lecture Middleware – Cloud Computing
• Summer semester 2026: Lecture Distributed Systems
• Winter semester 2025/26: Lecture Middleware – Cloud Computing
• Summer semester 2025: Seminar Selected Chapters of System Software: Replicated Systems and Blockchain Systems; Exercise Distributed Systems
• Before 2025: Exercises in IT security and cloud security at the University of Passau

Academic Service

• Workshop organization: Local organizer of the ROBUST 2026 workshop (Resilient Operations – Byzantine Fault Tolerance and State-Machine Replication), Erlangen, October 2026
• Program committees: EDCC 2027 · DAIS 2026 · BRAINS 2026 · ROBUST 2026 · DAIS 2025 · OPODIS 2025 · ROBUST 2025
• Journal reviewing: IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing · Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing · Science of Computer Programming · Blockchain: Research and Applications · Computer Communications
• Grant reviewing: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
• Memberships: IEEE Computer Society · ACM · Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI)

Open-Source Software

• Maintainer of BFT-SMaRt, a modern library for Byzantine fault-tolerant state machine replication
• Owner of Delphi-BFT, a tool for automating large-scale simulations of replication protocols
• Contributor to Mercury (Middleware 2024 artifact) and OptiLog, a BFT monitoring and optimization framework (EuroSys 2026 artifact)

Publications

See also my profiles on Google Scholar · dblp · ORCID.

2026

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018