IOTA cryptocurrency is a distributed solution for secure messaging and micropayments between Internet-of Things devices. The authors introduced open source hardware accelerators for Curl hash function and proof-of-work computations to increase the processing rate of IOTA transactions. The structure and operation principle of both accelerators are described. Proposed accelerators have been implemented on FPGA and integrated into ARM-based System-on-Chip. The characteristics of the system have been evaluated. Compared to official software implementation the proposed hardware accelerators demonstrate x2100 speed up on the creation of IOTA transactions.
Blockmania is a byzantine consensus protocol. Nodes emit blocks forming a directed acyclic graph (block DAG) that is subsequently interpreted by each node separately to ensure consensus with safety, liveness and finality. The resulting system has communication complexity $O(N^2)$ even in the worse case, and very low constant factors --- as compared to $O(N^4)$ for PBFT; it is leaderless; and network operations do not depend on the composition of the quorum or node stake. This makes Blockmania very efficient (leading to over 400K transactions per second on a wide area network), and ideal for dynamic membership and flexible and non-interrupted proof-of-stake protocols. A X-Blockmania variant, has $O(N)$ communication cost but also higher latency $O(\log N)$.
This paper proposes a novel adaptation of blockchain technology to information exchanges among vehicles traveling in a platoon. The aim is to protect platoon member privacy and security while providing a rapid sharing of telemetry data. We have identified key protocols for a distributed cryptographic authentication among vehicles in transit within a platoon. This work heralds consideration of cyber-attack types on platoons and our proposed remedies.
Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is a flexible permissioned blockchain platform designed for business applications beyond the basic digital coin addressed by Bitcoin and other existing networks. A key property of HLF is its extensibility, and in particular the support for multiple ordering services for building the blockchain. Nonetheless, the version 1.0 was launched in early 2017 without an implementation of a Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) ordering service. To overcome this limitation, we designed, implemented, and evaluated a BFT ordering service for HLF on top of the BFT-SMaRt state machine replication/consensus library, implementing also optimizations for wide-area deployment. Our results show that HLF with our ordering service can achieve up to ten thousand transactions per second and write a transaction irrevocably in the blockchain in half a second, even with peers spread in different continents.
Ayush Dubey, Greg D. Hill, Robert Escriva, Emin Gün Sirer
Graph databases have become an increasingly common infrastructure component. Yet existing systems either operate on offline snapshots, provide weak consistency guarantees, or use expensive concurrency control techniques that limit performance. In this paper, we introduce a new distributed graph database, called Weaver, which enables efficient, transactional graph analyses as well as strictly serializable ACID transactions on dynamic graphs. The key insight that allows Weaver to combine strict serializability with horizontal scalability and high performance is a novel request ordering mechanism called refinable timestamps. This technique couples coarse-grained vector timestamps with a fine-grained timeline oracle to pay the overhead of strong consistency only when needed. Experiments show that Weaver enables a Bitcoin blockchain explorer that is 8x faster than Blockchain.info, and achieves 12x higher throughput than the Titan graph database on social network workloads and 4x lower latency than GraphLab on offline graph traversal workloads.
We present a general framework for constructing non-interactive universally composable (UC) commitment schemes that are secure against adaptive adversaries in the non-erasure setting under a single re-usable common reference string. Previously, such “fully-equipped ” UC commitment schemes are only known in [8, 9], with an unavoidable overhead of O(κ) in the sense of communication and computational complexities; meaning that to commit λ bits, the communication and computational costs require O(λκ), where κ denotes the security parameter. Efficient construction of a fully-equipped UC commitment scheme was a long-standing open problem. We introduce a cryptographic primitive, called all-but-many encryptions (ABMEs), and prove that it is a translation of fully-equipped UC commitment in the primitive level. We then construct ABMEs from cryptographic primitives that we call a probabilistic pseudo random function family and extractable sigma protocols – the former is a probabilistic version of a pseudo random function family and the latter is a special kind of sigma (i.e., canonical 3-round public-coin HVSZK) protocols with some extractability. We provide fully-equipped UC commitment schemes from ABMEs under DDH and DCR-based assumptions, respectively. In particular, the DCR-based scheme is the first fully-equipped UC commitment scheme with optimal expansion factor Ω(1); to commit κ bits, the communication and computational costs are Ω(κ). We further construct a fully-equipped UC commitment scheme from a general assumption (in which trap-door permutations exist), which is far more efficient than the previous construction [9], because, unlike [9], our construction does not require non-interactive zero-knowledge proof systems. 1
A.J. Chakravarti, Gerald Baumgartner, Mario Lauria
The Organic Grid is a biologically inspired and fully decentralized approach to the organization of computation that is based on the autonomous scheduling of strongly mobile agents on a peer-to-peer network. Through the careful design of agent behavior, the emerging organization of the computation can be customized for different classes of applications. In this paper, we report on our experience in adapting the general framework to run two representative applications on our Organic Grid prototype: the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) basic local alignment search tool (BLAST) code for sequence alignment, and the Cannon's algorithm for matrix multiplication. The first is an example of independent task application, a type of application commonly used for grid scheduling research because of its easily decomposable nature and absence of intra-node communication. The second is a popular block algorithm for parallel matrix multiplication, and represents a challenging application for grid platforms because of its highly structured and synchronous communication pattern. Agent behavior completely determines the way computation is organized on the Organic Grid. We intentionally chose two applications at opposite ends of the distributed computing spectrum having very different requirements in terms of communication topology, resource use, and response to faults. We detail the design of the agent behavior and show how the different requirements can be satisfied. By encapsulating application code and scheduling functionality into mobile agents, we decouple both computation and scheduling from the underlying grid infrastructure. In the resulting system, every node can inject a computation onto the grid; the computation naturally organizes itself around available resources.
We present a protocol for controlling a shared ATM multicast tree supporting many-to-many communication. The protocol supports one or several ATM virtual channel connections (VCCs) of the many-to-many type. The number of VCCs is independent of the number of endpoints. The protocol guarantees that there is no interleaving on any VCC of the tree. The protocol also guarantees that the traffic contract associated with the VCCs is respected, thus making it possible to use ordinary VCCs of the constant bit rate (CBR), variable bit rate (VBR), or unspecified bit rate (UBR) class. No resequencing server or cell buffering inside the network is required, and all cell forwarding is performed at the ATM layer. We describe the protocol both informally and formally.