Follow blockchain research across journals, conferences, and preprint repositories.
9,005 results · page 302 of 376
Xavier Bultel, Jannik Dreier, Jean‐Guillaume Dumas, Pascal Lafourcade · 10 authors
No abstract is available for this record.
Shashank Agrawal, Chaya Ganesh, Payman Mohassel
The two most common ways to design non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proofs are based on Sigma protocols and QAP-based SNARKs. The former is highly efficient for proving algebraic statements while the latter is superior for arithmetic representations.
Usman W. Chohan
No abstract is available for this record.
Chaya Ganesh, Claudio Orlandi, Daniel Tschudi
Proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols are emerging as one of the most promising alternative to the wasteful proof-of-work (PoW) protocols for consensus in Blockchains (or distributed ledgers). However, current PoS protocols inherently disclose both the identity and the wealth of the stakeholders, and thus seem incompatible with privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies (such as ZCash, Monero, etc.). In this paper we initiate the formal study for PoS protocols with privacy properties. Our results include: 1. A (theoretical) feasibility result showing that it is possible to construct a general class of private PoS (PPoS) protocols; and to add privacy to a wide class of PoS protocols, 2. A privacy-preserving version of a popular PoS protocol, Ouroboros Praos.
Ilya Sergey, Amrit Kumar, Aquinas Hobor
No abstract is available for this record.
Hisham S. Galal, Amr Youssef
No abstract is available for this record.
Elie Kfoury, David Khoury
No abstract is available for this record.
Christian Badertscher, Juan A. Garay, Ueli Maurer, Daniel Tschudi · 5 authors
No abstract is available for this record.
Yi Liu, Xingtong Liu, Chaojing Tang, Jian Wang · 5 authors
Bitcoin combines a peer-to-peer network and cryptographic algorithm to implement a distributed digital currency system, which keeps all transaction history on a public blockchain. Since all transactions recorded on the blockchain are public to everyone, Bitcoin users face a threat of leaking financial privacy. Many analysis and deanonymization approaches have been proposed to link transaction records to real identities. To eliminate this threat, we present an unlinkable coin mixing scheme that allows users to mix their bitcoins without trusting a third party. This mixing scheme employs a primitive known as ring signature with elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) to conceal the transfer of coins between addresses. The mixing server is only able to check whether the output addresses belong to its customers, but it cannot tell which address owned by which customer. Customers do not have to rely on the reputation of a third party to ensure his money will be returned, and his privacy will not be leaked. This scheme needs no modifications on current Bitcoin system and is convenient to deploy by any communities. We implemented a prototype of our scheme and tested it under the Bitcoin core's regtest mode. Security and privacy of our mixing scheme are ensured through the standard ring signature and ECDSA unforgeability.
Andrew Miller, Zhicheng Cai, Somesh Jha
No abstract is available for this record.
Carlos Molina-Jiménez, Ellis Solaiman, Ioannis Sfyrakis, Irene C. L. Ng · 5 authors
In this paper we discuss how conventional business contracts can be converted into smart contracts---their electronic equivalents that can be used to systematically monitor and enforce contractual rights, obligations and prohibitions at run time. We explain that emerging blockchain technology is certainly a promising platform for implementing smart contracts but argue that there is a large class of applications, where blockchain is inadequate due to performance, scalability, and consistency requirements, and also due to language expressiveness and cost issues that are hard to solve. We explain that in some situations a centralised approach that does not rely on blockchain is a better alternative due to its simplicity, scalability, and performance. We suggest that in applications where decentralisation and transparency are essential, developers can advantageously combine the two approaches into hybrid solutions where some operations are enforced by enforcers deployed on--blockchains and the rest by enforcers deployed on trusted third parties.
Harry Kalodner, Steven Goldfeder, Xiaoqi Chen, S. Matthew Weinberg · 5 authors
No abstract is available for this record.
Jason Paul Cruz, Yuichi Kaji, Naoto Yanai
The role-based access control (RBAC) framework is a mechanism that describes the access control principle. As a common interaction, an organization provides a service to a user who owns a certain role that was issued by a different organization. Such trans-organizational RBAC is common in face-toface communication but not in a computer network, because it is difficult to establish both the security that prohibits the malicious impersonation of roles and the flexibility that allows small organizations to participate and users to fully control their own roles. In this paper, we present an RBAC using smart contract (RBAC-SC), a platform that makes use of Ethereum's smart contract technology to realize a trans organizational utilization of roles. Ethereum is an open blockchain platform that is designed to be secure, adaptable, and flexible. It pioneered smart contracts, which are decentralized applications that serve as “autonomous agents”running exactly as programmed and are deployed on a blockchain. The RBAC-SC uses smart contracts and blockchain technology as versatile infrastructures to represent the trust and endorsement relationship that are essential in the RBAC and to realize a challenge-response authentication protocol that verifies a user's ownership of roles. We describe the RBAC-SC framework, which is composed of two main parts, namely, the smart contract and the challenge-response protocol, and present a performance analysis. A prototype of the smart contract is created and deployed on Ethereum's Testnet blockchain, and the source code is publicly available.
Yehuda Lindell, Ariel Nof, Samuel Ranellucci
ECDSA is a standardized signing algorithm that is widely used in TLS, code signing, cryptocurrency and more. Due to its importance, the problem of securely computing ECDSA in a distributed manner (known as threshold signing) has received considerable interest. However, despite this interest, there is still no full threshold solution for more than 2 parties (meaning that any t -out-of- n parties can sign, security is preserved for any t-1 or fewer corrupted parties, and tłeq n can be any value thus supporting an honest minority) that has practical key distribution. This is due to the fact that all previous solutions for this utilize Paillier homomorphic encryption, and efficient distributed Paillier key generation for more than two parties is not known. In this paper, we present the first truly practical full threshold ECDSA signing protocol that has both fast signing and fast key distribution. This solves a years-old open problem, and opens the door to practical uses of threshold ECDSA signing that are in demand today. One of these applications is the construction of secure cryptocurrency wallets (where key shares are spread over multiple devices and so are hard to steal) and cryptocurrency custody solutions (where large sums of invested cryptocurrency are strongly protected by splitting the key between a bank/financial institution, the customer who owns the currency, and possibly a third-party trustee, in multiple shares at each). There is growing practical interest in such solutions, but prior to our work these could not be deployed today due to the need for distributed key generation.
Gao Yu-long, Xiu‐Bo Chen, Yuling Chen, Ying Sun · 6 authors
Nowadays, blockchain has become one of the most cutting-edge technologies, which has been widely concerned and researched. However, the quantum computing attack seriously threatens the security of blockchain, and related research is still less. Targeting at this issue, in this paper, we present the definition of post-quantum blockchain (PQB) and propose a secure cryptocurrency scheme based on PQB, which can resist quantum computing attacks. First, we propose a signature scheme based on lattice problem. We use lattice basis delegation algorithm to generate secret keys with selecting a random value, and sign message by preimage sampling algorithm. In addition, we design the first-signature and last-signature in our scheme, which are defined as double-signature. It is used to reduce the correlation between the message and the signature. Second, by combining the proposed signature scheme with blockchain, we construct the PQB and propose this cryptocurrency scheme. Its security can be reduced to the lattice short integer solution (SIS) problem. At last, through our analysis, the proposed cryptocurrency scheme is able to resist the quantum computing attack and its signature satisfies correctness and one-more unforgeability under the lattice SIS assumption. Furthermore, compared with previous signature schemes, the sizes of signature and secret keys are relatively shorter than that of others, which can decrease the computational complexity. These make our cryptocurrency scheme more secure and efficient.
Anastasia Mavridou, Áron Lászka
Blockchain-based distributed computing platforms enable the trusted execution of computation - defined in the form of smart contracts - without trusted agents. Smart contracts are envisioned to have a variety of applications, ranging from financial to IoT asset tracking. Unfortunately, the development of smart contracts has proven to be extremely error prone. In practice, contracts are riddled with security vulnerabilities comprising a critical issue since bugs are by design non-fixable and contracts may handle financial assets of significant value. To facilitate the development of secure smart contracts, we have created the FSolidM framework, which allows developers to define contracts as finite state machines (FSMs) with rigorous and clear semantics. FSolidM provides an easy-to-use graphical editor for specifying FSMs, a code generator for creating Ethereum smart contracts, and a set of plugins that developers may add to their FSMs to enhance security and functionality.
Xuechao Yang, Xun Yi, Surya Nepal, Fengling Han
No abstract is available for this record.
Alex Biryukov, Dmitry Khovratovich, Sergei Tikhomirov
Identity is a fundamental concept for the financial industry. In order to comply with regulation, financial institutions must verify the identity of their customers. Identities are currently handled in a centralized way, which diminishes users' control over their personal information and threats their privacy. Blockchain systems, especially those with support for smart contracts (e.g., Ethereum), are expected to serve as a basis of more decentralized systems for digital identity management. We propose a design of a privacy-preserving KYC scheme on top of Ethereum. It would let providers of financial services leverage the potential of blockchain technology to increase effciency of customer onboarding while complying with regulation and protecting users' privacy.
Jakub Zakrzewski
No abstract is available for this record.
Ilya Grishchenko, Matteo Maffei, Clara Schneidewind
The recent growth of the blockchain technology market puts its main cryptocurrencies in the spotlight. Among them, Ethereum stands out due to its virtual machine (EVM) supporting smart contracts, i.e., distributed programs that control the flow of the digital currency Ether. Being written in a Turing complete language, Ethereum smart contracts allow for expressing a broad spectrum of financial applications. The price for this expressiveness, however, is a significant semantic complexity, which increases the risk of programming errors. Recent attacks exploiting bugs in smart contract implementations call for the design of formal verification techniques for smart contracts. This, however, requires rigorous semantic foundations, a formal characterization of the expected security properties, and dedicated abstraction techniques tailored to the specific EVM semantics. This work will overview the state-of-the-art in smart contract verification, covering formal semantics, security definitions, and verification tools. We will then focus on EtherTrust [ 1 ], a framework for the static analysis of Ethereum smart contracts which includes the first complete small-step semantics of EVM bytecode, the first formal characterization of a large class of security properties for smart contracts, and the first static analysis for EVM bytecode that comes with a proof of soundness.
Hisham S. Galal, Amr Youssef
The success of the Ethereum blockchain as a decentralized application platform with a distributed consensus protocol has made many organizations start to invest into running their business on top of it. Technically, the most impressive feature behind the success of Ethereum is its support for a Turing complete language. On the other hand, the inherent transparency and, consequently, the lack of privacy poses a great challenge for many financial applications. In this paper, we tackle this challenge and present a smart contract for a verifiable sealed-bid auction on the Ethereum blockchain. In a nutshell, initially, the bidders submit homomorphic commitments to their sealed-bids on the contract. Subsequently, they reveal their commitments secretly to the auctioneer via a public key encryption scheme. Then, according to the auction rules, the auctioneer determines and claims the winner of the auction. Finally, we utilize interactive zero-knowledge proof protocols between the smart contract and the auctioneer to verify the correctness of such a claim. The underlying protocol of the proposed smart contract is partially privacy-preserving. To be precise, no information about the losing bids is leaked to the bidders. We provide an analysis of the proposed protocol and the smart contract design, in addition to the estimated gas costs associated with the different transactions.
Sergei Tikhomirov
No abstract is available for this record.
Ilya Grishchenko, Matteo Maffei, Clara Schneidewind
Smart contracts are programs running on cryptocurrency (e.g., Ethereum) blockchains, whose popularity stem from the possibility to perform financial transactions, such as payments and auctions, in a distributed environment without need for any trusted third party. Given their financial nature, bugs or vulnerabilities in these programs may lead to catastrophic consequences, as witnessed by recent attacks. Unfortunately, programming smart contracts is a delicate task that requires strong expertise: Ethereum smart contracts are written in Solidity, a dedicated language resembling JavaScript, and shipped over the blockchain in the EVM bytecode format. In order to rigorously verify the security of smart contracts, it is of paramount importance to formalize their semantics as well as the security properties of interest, in particular at the level of the bytecode being executed. In this paper, we present the first complete small-step semantics of EVM bytecode, which we formalize in the F* proof assistant, obtaining executable code that we successfully validate against the official Ethereum test suite. Furthermore, we formally define for the first time a number of central security properties for smart contracts, such as call integrity, atomicity, and independence from miner controlled parameters. This formalization relies on a combination of hyper- and safety properties. Along this work, we identified various mistakes and imprecisions in existing semantics and verification tools for Ethereum smart contracts, thereby demonstrating once more the importance of rigorous semantic foundations for the design of security verification techniques.
Nicola Atzei, Massimo Bartoletti, Tiziana Cimoli, Stefano Lande · 5 authors
Albeit the primary usage of Bitcoin is to exchange currency, its blockchain and consensus mechanism can also be exploited to securely execute some forms of smart contracts. These are agreements among mutually distrusting parties, which can be automatically enforced without resorting to a trusted intermediary. Over the last few years a variety of smart contracts for Bitcoin have been proposed, both by the academic community and by that of developers. However, the heterogeneity in their treatment, the informal (often incomplete or imprecise) descriptions, and the use of poorly documented Bitcoin features, pose obstacles to the research. In this paper we present a comprehensive survey of smart contracts on Bitcoin, in a uniform framework. Our treatment is based on a new formal specification language for smart contracts, which also helps us to highlight some subtleties in existing informal descriptions, making a step towards automatic verification. We discuss some obstacles to the diffusion of smart contracts on Bitcoin, and we identify the most promising open research challenges.