Current mobile System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures suffer from a fundamental âReactive Polling Tax,â where high-level software must frequently interrupt low-power hardware states to query rawsensor telemetry. This paper introduces the Contextual Neural Bus (CNB), a dedicated, asynchronous hardware-level interconnect designed to shift context awareness from volatile software cycles to deterministic silicon logic. By utilizing a decentralized multi-modal fusion layer, the CNB generates Universal Intent Tokens (UITs)â64-bit cryptographic primitives that represent verified user states at the physical layer. Unlike legacy co-processors that merely buffer data, the CNB integrates a Hardware-Resident Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) Generator to provide mathematical certainty of user intentwhile physically isolating raw biometric and environmental telemetry within a secure silicon enclave. Preliminary simulations using a digital-twin SoC model indicate a 90.8% reduction in interrupt driven power consumption, effectively achieving âEnergy-Neutral Privacyâ by utilizing the resulting power surplus to offset cryptographic overhead. Furthermore, the architecture introduces Predictive L3 Cache Pre-warming, which anticipates user interactions to virtually eliminate âcold-startâ application latencies. By anchoring proactive computing in the deterministic reliability of silicon, this work establishes a scalable, privacy-first path toward zero-latency, energy-autonomous mobile ecosystems.
ABSTRACT The emergence of wireless technology brought about enhanced communication across various devices, resulting in the demand for efficient and reliable wireless networks, like wireless mesh networks (WMNs) and mobile Adâhoc Networks (MANETs). MANETs are known for their decentralized nature, rapid deployment, infrastructureâless operation, adaptability, and ease of use in several applications and outdoor events. Despite their flexibility, they often face challenges relating to security vulnerabilities, together with blackhole and grayhole attacks, and tradeâoffs in terms of performance relating to reliability and integrity. This paper proposes an improved, innovative routing protocol for Adâhoc OnâDemand Distance Vector (AODV) by infusion of blockchain's proof of stake (PoS) consensus mechanism named PoSAODV, whose objective is to enhance security, energyâefficiency, and adaptability while reducing packet loss rate, routing overheads, and increasing throughput. Smart contractâbased validator selection was utilized to ensure fairness and reduce blackhole and grayhole attacks. The result obtained through simulation demonstrates that PoSAODV outperforms the original AODV by reduced latency of 0.79 ms , average throughput of 45 Mbps , and packet delivery ratio of 80%â100% in both unsafe and safe environments. This makes PoSAODV suitable for resourceâconstrained adâhoc networks with dynamic topologies.
Popular technologies such as blockchain and zero-knowledge proof, which have already entered the enterprise space, heavily use cryptography as the core of their protocol stack. One of the most used systems in this regard is Elliptic Curve Cryptography, precisely the point multiplication operation, which provides the security assumption for all applications that use this system. As this operation is computationally intensive, one solution is to offload it to specialized accelerators to provide better throughput and increased efficiency. In this paper, we explore the use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and the High-Level Synthesis framework of AMD Vitis in designing an elliptic curve point arithmetic unit (point adder) for the secp256k1 curve. We show how task-level parallel programming and data streaming are used in designing a RISC processor-like architecture to provide pipeline parallelism and increase the throughput of the point adder unit. We also show how to efficiently use the proposed processor architecture by designing a point multiplication scheduler capable of scheduling multiple batches of elliptic curve points to utilize the point adder unit efficiently. Finally, we evaluate our design on an AMD-Xilinx Alveo-family FPGA and show that our point arithmetic processor has better throughput and frequency than related work.
Ethereum is currently the second largest blockchain by market capitalization and a popular platform for cryptocurrencies. As it has grown, the high value present and the anonymity afforded by the technology have led Ethereum to become a hotbed for various cybercrimes. This paper seeks to understand how these fraudulent schemes may be characterized and develop methods for detecting them. One key feature introduced by Ethereum is the ability to use programmable smart contracts to execute code on the blockchain. A common use of smart contracts is implementing fungible tokens with the ERC-20 interface. Such tokens can be used to impersonate legitimate tokens and defraud users. By parsing the event logs emitted by these ERC-20 contracts over 20 different periods of 100K blocks, we construct token transfer graphs for each of the available ERC-20 tokens on the blockchain. By analyzing these graphs, we find a set of characteristics by which suspicious contracts are distinguished from legitimate ones. These observations result in a simple model that can identify scam contracts with an average of 88.7% accuracy. This suggests that the mechanism by which fraudulent schemes function strongly correlates with their transfer graphs and that these graphs may be used to improve scam-detection mechanisms, contributing to making Ethereum safer.
Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is a widely used privacy-preserving technology, where multiscalar multiplication (MSM) accounts for over 70% of the computational workload. The acceleration of MSM can enhance the overall performance of ZKP, making it a focal point of community attention. However, in practical applications involving the deployment of multiple MSM accelerators, existing designs often overlook strategies for optimizing bandwidth and area efficiency. To address this, we propose Myosotis, an efficiently pipelined and parameterized MSM architecture. By sharing input data and allocating cache effectively, it mitigates average transmission bandwidth in runtime. Myosotis also supports the use of multiple point addition (PADD) units to achieve performance gains, balancing area overhead and latency for improved area efficiency. Different parameter selection enables a tradeoff between the performance, area, and bandwidth of the MSM accelerator. When benchmarking with MSM degrees between$2^{18}$and$2^{26}$, our proposed baseline design achieves up to$3.32\times $and$6.72\times $speedups over state-of-the-art FPGA and ASIC designs. Compared to the baseline, Myosotis with two window MSMs and one PADD unit reduces bandwidth demand by 43% while maintaining similar area and latency. On the other hand, Myosotis with three window MSMs and two PADD units decreases latency by 43% and bandwidth by 17%, with only a 9% area increase.
Ethereum is rapidly expanding through cross-chain linkages with its layer 2 and EVM-compatible blockchains. As it is already the largest ecosystem in terms of the number of users, applications, and economic value, it is of a great importance to study the speed, network activity and power consumption of its protocols. Furthermore, understanding the correlation between network activity and power consumption is important to gain insight into those protocols' scalability. An examination of Ethereum, Ethereum Layer 2 (Arbitrum and Optimism), and EVM-compatible (Avalanche, BSC, and Harmony) blockchain protocols revealed that emerging Ethereum Layer 2 and EVM-compatible blockchains are faster than Ethereum. Pearson analysis between power consumption and network activity showed weak correlations. Furthermore, there is no evidence of Granger causality between the power consumption and the network activity in either direction for any blockchain protocol. This finding suggests that power consumption is independent of network activity, indicating that protocols that consume less power do not do so because of their low network activity, but rather because of protocol-specific optimization. This also shows that these protocols can potentially scale with user growth. This study, therefore, serves as a valuable insight for those planning to implement blockchain protocols tailored to their industry requirements.
Blockchain interoperability has become an essential functionality, which enables asset/data transfers across different blockchains. Sidechains have been deemed as a key technique to provide interoperability. However, sidechains are rarely used in practice, this is because sidechain technologies are impractical and non cost-efficient. To make sidechains practical, in this paper, we design a universal sidechain construction named USSC, which applies to a variety of blockchains without forking them. USSC also enables interoperability across heterogeneous blockchains regardless of underlying consensus. This is facilitated by three components: i) a committee selection method, ii) a cross-chain certificate, and iii) a cross-chain bridge based on smart contracts. The proposed committee-selection method guarantees an honest majority within a committee. Through a concrete implementation of USSC, we outline how the proof-of-stake (PoS) and the proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains enable asset transfers. Furthermore, our USSC is more storage-efficient because it produces a smaller size of certificate and only needs partial nodes instead of all sidechain nodes following a blockchain. Thus, USSC can reduce the overhead of storage and communication of nodes. In addition, we prove that USSC achieves a secure sidechain construction with desirable security properties. Finally, we develop a proof-of-concept implementation of USSC using Cardano and Ethereum. Experimental results demonstrate that USSC outperforms PoW and PoS sidechains, in terms of the certificate size.
A connected loopless graph is 2-edge-connected if it remains connected after the removal of at most one of its edges. Many combinatorial optimization problems seek, for a given graph with costs on its edges, a spanning subgraph satisfying certain connectivity constraints. The minimum 2-edge-connected spanning subgraph problem (2-ECSSP) is a problem of this type. It can be formulated as an integer linear program that selects edges of minimum total cost satisfying the restriction that every cut of the given graph is covered by at least two of the selected edges. This problem is known to be NP-hard. This thesis develops rounding algorithms for three variants of 2-ECSSP, focusing on rounding half-integral solutions of the corresponding linear relaxation. This family of solutions often yields the largest known integrality ratio for various subproblems of 2-ECSSP. The first problem we investigate is the half-integral 2-ECSSP with unrestricted costs. We develop a novel 5/3-rounding that, to the best of our knowledge, is the first one with a factor better than 2. Moreover, we design a reduction scheme, restricting the problem to 4-edge-connected graphs with maximum degree at most five. Then, we study the matching augmentation problem (MAP), a subproblem of 2-ECSSP in which the edge costs are either 0 or 1 and the zero cost edges define a matching. We survey a better-than-2-approximation, obtained in 2022 by Bamas, Drygala, and Svensson, presenting a comprehensive proof of their result and determining an improved factor. Additionally, we address conjectures posed in their work and present computational experiments to support our findings. Finally, we discuss the 2-edge-connected spanning multisubgraph problem (2-ECSMP), a variation of 2-ECSSP in which multiple copies of the same edge can be selected. We survey a recent work by Boyd et al. on a 4/3-rounding for the half-integral 2-ECSMP and leverage their techniques to prove novel decomposition theorems for 4-regular 4-edge-connected graphs. Finally, we pose two conjectures concerning extensions of the decomposition results, suggesting new research directions.
Matrix multiplication is a common operation in applications like machine learning and data analytics. To demonstrate the correctness of such an operation in a privacy-preserving manner, we propose zkMatrix, a zero-knowledge proof for the multiplication of committed matrices. Among the succinct non-interactive zero-knowledge protocols that have an O(log n) transcript size and O(log n) verifier time, zkMatrix stands out as the first to achieve O(n2) prover time and O(n2) RAM usage for multiplying two n X n matrices. Significantly, zkMatrix distinguishes itself as the first zk-SNARK protocol specifically designed for matrix multiplication. By batching multiple proofs together, each additional matrix multiplication only necessitates O(n) group operations in prover time.
Multi-Scalar Multiplication (MSM) is a fundamental cryptographic primitive, which plays a crucial role in Zero-knowledge proof systems. In this paper, we optimize the single MSM Process Element (PE) utilizing buckets with fewer conflicts, enhanced by Greedy-based scheduling, to achieve higher efficiency. The evaluation results show our optimized single MSM PE achieving a speedup of over two times on average, peaking at 3.63 times compared to previous works. Furthermore, we introduce Gypsophila, a scalable and bandwidth-optimized architecture for implementing multiple MSM PEs. Leveraging the characteristics of the bucket method, we optimize the data flow by balancing the throughput of bucket classification, bucket aggregation, and result aggregation in MSM. Simultaneously, multiple PEs with different data access patterns share a universal point input channel and post-processing unit, which improves the module utilization and mitigates the bandwidth pressure. Gypsophila with 16 PEs, accomplishes 16 MSM tasks in a mere 1.01% additional time, showcasing an approximate 7.8% reduction in area, with only about 116 of the bandwidth requirement, compared with 16 PEs without input channel and post-process unit sharing.
Yutian Chen, Cong Peng, Yu Dai, Min Luo · 5 authors
Multi-scalar multiplication (MSM) is an important building block in most of elliptic-curve-based zero-knowledge proof systems, such as Groth16 and PLONK. Recently, Lu et al. proposed cuZK, a new parallel MSM algorithm on GPUs. In this paper, we revisit this scheme and present a new GPU-based implementation to further improve the performance of MSM algorithm. First, we propose a novel method for mapping scalars into Pippengerâs bucket indices, largely reducing the number of buckets compared to the original Pippenger algorithm. Second, in the case that memory is sufficient, we develop a new efficient algorithm based on homogeneous coordinates in the bucket accumulation phase. Moreover, our accumulation phase is load-balanced, which means the parallel speedup ratio is almost linear growth as the number of device threads increases. Finally, we also propose a parallel layered reduction algorithm for the bucket aggregation phase, whose time complexity remains at the logarithmic level of the number of buckets. The implementation results over the BLS12-381 curve on the V100 graphics card show that our proposed algorithm achieves up to 1.998x, 1.821x and 1.818x speedup compared to cuZK at scales of 221, 222, and 223, respectively.
The primary trend in the development of modern information technologies is the migration of computations to the cloud, making distributed computing the dominant strategy for information processing. In particular, this poses the challenge of reliable distributed data storage. A well-known approach to solving the problem of distributed data storage is blockchain or, more generally, distributed ledger technology. A key challenge of this technology is creating an effective mechanism for the global numbering of registry records. The complexity of solving this problem results from the fundamental limitations of distributed computing â the inability to accurately synchronize distributed computing processes and the limitations resulting from the CAP theorem for distributed data stores. The authors attempt to circumvent the mentioned limitations based on the hypothesis that such limitations can be overcome by considering both the network topology and narrowing the class of distributed systems to distributed registers. The work is based on methods of modeling distributed computing, particularly the model of space-time diagrams proposed by L. Lamport. This model allows us to introduce such a tool as logical clocks, including Lamport's logical clock algorithm. Unfortunately, Lamport's logical clock algorithm allows assigning a common timestamp to different events if they are concurrent. The paper proposes an algorithm that is a composition of Lamport's clock algorithm and the wave algorithm, which is not only a logical clock but also assigns different timestamps to different events. Thus, this algorithm provides a mechanism for the global numbering of entries of distributed ledger replicas. A problematic issue remains gaps in the series of ledger entry numbers. Thus, the paper proposes an effective mechanism for the global numbering of records of a distributed register and identifies a shortcoming of this mechanism. Further study is to identify specific conditions in terms of network topology that would ensure the absence of the mentioned shortcoming.
Protecting the privacy of blockchain transactions is extremely important for users. Stealth address protocols (SAP) allow users to receive assets via stealth addresses that they do not associate with their stealth meta-addresses. SAP can be generated using different cryptographic approaches. DKSAP uses an elliptic curve multiplication and hashing of the resulting shared secret. Another approach is to use a elliptic curve pairing. This paper presents four SA protocols that use elliptic curve pairing as a cryptographic solution. ECPDKSAPs are pairing-based protocols that include viewing key and spending key, while ECPSKSAP is a pairing-based protocol that uses a single key with which spending and the viewing key are derived. We find that ECPDKSAPs give significantly better results than DKSAP with the view tag. The best results are achieved with Protocol 3 (Elliptic Curve Pairing Dual Key Stealth Address Protocol), which is Ethereum-friendly. ECPSKSAP is significantly slower, but it provides an interesting theoretical result as it uses only one private key.
Hyperledger Fabric, which satisfies decentralization and security, is one of the most popular blockchain distributed ledger technologies, but in high-throughput, high-concurrency distributed scenarios, concurrency conflicts can cause transactions to fail, resulting in significant network bandwidth and resource waste. In this paper, we deeply analyze the operation flow of Fabricâs underlying transactions, and propose a solution to concurrent transaction conflicts in Fabric based on distributed locks and message queues. Redis is used to implement the locking mechanism of concurrent keys, and the ChaincodeEvent event listener is used to detect the transactions and realize the unlocking operation; on this basis, the message asynchronous retry mechanism, i.e., use the message queue RabbitMQ to re-consume the conflicting transactions to solve the concurrent transaction conflicts encountered against Fabric at present. Experiments show that the proposed approach can significantly improve the concurrency capability of the system, including transaction success rate and effective transaction throughput, under different levels of transaction conflicts; it does not affect the performance of the system in the absence of transaction conflicts.
Amal Abdulbaqi Maryoosh, Ahmed Abd Ali Abdulkadhim, Muntaha AbdulzahraHatem
Block chain is a technology for securely storing data in a manner that makes system changes or hacks impossible or difficult. Numerous organizations have adopted this technology, which utilizes a peer-to-peer distributed network. Using a decentralized peer-to-peer network to operate. A block chain is a collection of linked computer systems that operate as a distributed ledger of transactions. Every new transaction that happens on the block chain is copied to each participant's ledger, and each block on the chain is made up of numerous transactions. This paper aims to explain block chain technology, including its uses and difficulties.
Orestis Alpos, Christian Cachin, Simon Holmgaard Kamp, Jesper Buus Nielsen
We present simple and practical protocols for generating randomness as used by asynchronous total-order broadcast. The protocols are secure in a proof-of-stake setting with dynamically changing stake. They can be plugged into existing protocols for asynchronous total-order broadcast and will turn these into asynchronous total-order broadcast with dynamic stake. Our contribution relies on two important techniques. The paper "Random Oracles in Constantinople: Practical Asynchronous Byzantine Agreement using Cryptography" [Cachin, Kursawe, and Shoup, PODC 2000] has influenced the design of practical total-order broadcast through its use of threshold cryptography. However, it needs a setup protocol to be efficient. In a proof-of-stake setting with dynamic stake this setup would have to be continually recomputed, making the protocol impractical. The work "Asynchronous Byzantine Agreement with Subquadratic Communication" [Blum, Katz, Liu-Zhang, and Loss, TCC 2020] showed how to use an initial setup for broadcast to asymptotically efficiently generate sub-sequent setups. The protocol, however, resorted to fully homomorphic encryption and was therefore not practically efficient. We adopt their approach to the proof-of-stake setting with dynamic stake, apply it to the Constantinople paper, and remove the need for fully homomorphic encryption. This results in simple and practical proof-of-stake protocols.
Aleksandr I. Filippov, Artem Barger, Vladimir Popov, Oleg Abdrashitov
We have recently become witnesses of the constantly growing adoption of distributed ledger technology utilized in various domains, whereas for enterprise-grade solutions, the most prominent platform is Hyperledger Fabric [1]. However, the lack of a trusted source of time within the platform poses certain limitations in how this platform could be used. In particular, there is no built-in mechanism to ensure the expiration of the signing certificates during the validation phase of the transactions processing pipeline, which introduces severe concern from the platformâs usability and security point of view. Therefore, we would like to introduce a solution that incorporates Byzantine Fault Tolerant source of time into Hyperledger Fabric, where the suggested approach utilizes opened sourced implementation of SmartBFT [2] distributed consensus protocol.
Abstract During the last years, several card-based Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) protocols for Nikoliâs puzzles have been designed. Although there are relatively simple card-based ZKP protocols for a number of puzzles, such as Sudoku and Kakuro, some puzzles face difficulties in designing simple protocols. For example, Slitherlink requires novel and elaborate techniques to construct a protocol. In this study, we focus on three Nikoli puzzles: Nurikabe, Hitori, and Heyawake. To date, no card-based ZKP protocol for these puzzles has been developed, partially because they have a relatively tricky rule that colored cells should form a connected area (namely a polyomino); this rule, sometimes referred to as âBundan-kinâ (in Japanese), complicates the puzzles, as well as facilitating difficulties in designing card-based ZKP protocols. We address this challenging task and propose a method for verifying the connectivity of hidden colored cells in a ZKP manner, such that we construct card-based ZKP protocols for the three puzzles.
Shikaku is a pencil puzzle consisting of a rectangular grid, with some cells containing a number. The player has to partition the grid into rectangles such that each rectangle contains exactly one number equal to the area of that rectangle. In this paper, we propose two physical zero-knowledge proof protocols for Shikaku using a deck of playing cards, which allow a prover to physically show that he/she knows a solution of the puzzle without revealing it. Most importantly, in our second protocol we develop a general technique to physically verify a rectangle-shaped area with a certain size in a rectangular grid, which can be used to verify other problems with similar constraints.
Chrysoula Stathakopoulou, Tudor David, Matej PavloviÄ, Marko VukoliÄ
This paper presents Mir-BFT, a robust Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) total order broadcast protocol aimed at maxi-mizing throughput on wide-area networks (WANs), targetingdeployments in decentralized networks, such as permissionedand Proof-of-Stake permissionless blockchain systems. Mir-BFT is the first BFT protocol that allows multiple lead-ers to propose request batches independently (i.e., parallelleaders), while effectively precluding performance degrada-tion due to request duplication by rotating the assignmentof a partitioned request hash space to leaders. As this mech-anism removes the single-leader bandwidth bottleneck andexposes a computation bottleneck related to authenticatingclients even on a WAN, our protocol further boosts through-put using a client signature verification sharding optimization.Our evaluation shows that Mir-BFT outperforms state-of-the-art single-leader protocols and orders more than 60000 signedBitcoin-sized (500-byte) transactions per second on a widelydistributed setup (100 nodes, 1 Gbps WAN) with typical la-tencies of few seconds. Moreover, our evaluation exposesthe impact of duplicate requests on parallel leader protocolswhich Mir-BFT eliminates. We also evaluate Mir-BFT un-der different crash and Byzantine faults, demonstrating itsperformance robustness. Mir-BFT relies on classical BFT protocol constructs, whichsimplifies reasoning about its correctness. Specifically, Mir-BFT is a generalization of the celebrated and scrutinizedPBFT protocol. In a nutshell, Mir-BFT follows PBFT âsafety-wiseâ, with changes needed to accommodate novel featuresrestricted to PBFT liveness.
Daniel M. Kane, Andreas Fackler, Adam GÄ gol, Damian Straszak
There has been recently a lot of progress in designing efficient partially synchronous BFT consensus protocols that are meant to serve as core consensus engines for Proof of Stake blockchain systems. While the state-of-the-art solutions attain virtually optimal performance under this theoretical model, there is still room for improvement, as several practical aspects of such systems are not captured by this model. Most notably, during regular execution, due to financial incentives in such systems, one expects an overwhelming fraction of nodes to honestly follow the protocol rules and only few of them to be faulty, most likely due to temporary network issues. Intuitively, the fact that almost all nodes behave honestly should result in stronger confidence in blocks finalized in such periods, however it is not the case under the classical model, where finality is binary. We propose Highway, a new consensus protocol that is safe and live in the classical partially synchronous BFT model, while at the same time offering practical improvements over existing solutions. Specifically, block finality in Highway is not binary but is expressed by fraction of nodes that would need to break the protocol rules in order for a block to be reverted. During periods of honest participation finality of blocks might reach well beyond 1/3 (as what would be the maximum for classical protocols), up to even 1 (complete certainty). Having finality defined this way, Highway offers flexibility with respect to the configuration of security thresholds among nodes running the protocol, allowing nodes with lower thresholds to reach finality faster than the ones requiring higher levels of confidence.