Issue #9
This Week in Security:
1. Paper Title: Detective Mining: Selfish Mining Becomes Unrealistic under Mining Pool Environment.
Summary: This work presents a fundamental problem regarding the selfish mining strategy under the existence of mining pools and proposes a new attack strategy, showing that selfish mining pool may not profitable.
Authors: Suhyeon Lee*† and Seungjoo Kim*,
Affiliations: * Korea University and †ADD.
2. Paper Title: A Smart Contract Refereed Data Retrieval Protocol with a Provably Low Collateral Requirement.
Summary: A new data retrieval protocol with a collateral mechanism calibrated to disincentivizes cheating and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks at every stage, but that is at a fraction of the cost of storing the data.
Authors: James M. Shook*, Scott Simon† and Peter Mell*,
Affiliations: * National Institute of Standards and Technology and † National Security Agency.
3. Paper Title: An Empirical Evaluation of Selfish Mining and Strategic Mining in Proof-of-Work Blockchain with Multiple Miners.
Summary: An empirical investigation on selfish mining strategy in the context of multiple miners.
Authors: Tin Leelavimolsilp*, Long Tran-Thanh*, Sebastian Stein*, and Viet Hung Nguyen†,
Affiliations: * University of Southampton and Imperial College London.
4. Paper Title: Blockchain Mining Games with Pay Forward.
Summary: Miners have the ability to pay forward an amount to be collected by the first miner who successfully extends their branch, giving them the power to influence the incentives for mining. This work formulates a stochastic game for the study of such incentives and shows that smaller miners can guarantee that the best response of even substantially more powerful miners is to follow the expected behavior intended by the protocol designer.
Authors: Elias Koutsoupias*, Philip Lazos†, Paolo Serafino‡, and Foluso Ogunlana§,
Affiliations: * University of Oxford, † Sapienza University of Rome, ‡ Gran Sasso Research Institute and § Consensys.
This Week in Privacy:
1. Paper Title: RingCT 3.0 for Blockchain Confidential Transaction: Shorter Size and Stronger Security.
Summary: The RingCT3.0 protocol is 97% less than the ring signature size of the original RingCT1.0 protocol used in Monero, outperforming existing solutions in terms of efficiency and security.
Authors: Tsz Hon Yuen*, Shi-feng Sun†, Joseph K. Liu†, Man Ho Au‡, Muhammed F. Esgin†, and Qingzhao Zhang§, and Dawu Gu§,
Affiliations: * The University of Hong Kong, † Monash University, ‡ Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and § Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
2. Paper Title: Revisiting Privacy-aware Blockchain Public Key Infrastructure.
Summary: This work proposes the use of ring signatures to solve the problem of authenticating registered members of the blockchain during key update to ensure that only registered members can perform key updates and presents a revocation mechanism that involves key deletion from the blockchain for PB-PKI.
Authors: Olamide Omolola* and Paul Plessing*,
Affiliations: * Institute of Applied Information Processing and Communication.
This Week in Scalability:
1. Paper Title: DeXTT: Deterministic Cross-Blockchain Token Transfers.
Summary: A formal definition of a protocol which implements eventual consistency for cross-blockchain token transfers with a reference implementation in Solidity.
Authors: Michael Borkowski*, Marten Sigwart*, Philipp Frauenthaler*, Taneli Hukkinen†, and Stefan Schulte*,
Affiliations: * TU Wien and † Pantos GmbH.
2. Paper Title: A Framework for Blockchain Interoperability and Runtime Selection.
Summary: A framework that monitors several blockchains, allows the user to define functional and non-functional requirements, determines the most appropriate blockchain, and enables the switchover to that chain at runtime.
Authors: Philipp Frauenthaler*, Michael Borkowski*, and Stefan Schulte*
Affiliations: * TU Wien.
This Week in Proofs:
Summary: Removing the inefficiencies of Sybil-resistant mechanisms such as PoW and PoS, limiting the number of mining nodes a single individual would be able to run while keeping membership open to everyone, circumventing the impossibility of full decentralization and the blockchain scalability trilemma when instantiated on a blockchain with a consensus protocol based on the cryptographic random selection of nodes.
Authors: David Cerezo Sánchez*,
Affiliations: * Calctopia.
This Week in Consensus Protocols:
1. Paper Title: Afgjort – A Semi-Synchronous Finality Layer for Blockchains.
Summary: This work proposes two variants of a finality layer protocol, proving both of them secure in the setting with t < n/3 Byzantine parties and a semi-synchronous network.
Authors: Bernardo Magri*, Christian Matt†, Jesper Buus Nielsen*, and Daniel Tschudi*,
Affiliations: * Aarhus University and † Concordium.
This Week in Tokenomics:
1. Paper Title: A Deep Dive into Bitcoin Mining Pools: An Empirical Analysis of Mining Shares.
Summary: This work shows that individual miners are simultaneously operating across three Bitcoin pools and that in each analyzed pool a small number of actors (≤ 20) receives over 50% of all BTC payouts.
Authors: Matteo Romiti*, Aljosha Judmayer†, Alexei Zamyatin†‡, and Bernhard Haslhofer*,
Affiliations: * Austrian Institute of Technology, † SBA Research, and ‡ Imperial College London.
“Significant advancements and innovations in the blockchain space are constantly being achieved by academic researchers. We are committed to helping share and spread this research. In our newsletter, we aim to provide a list of publications that will help guide the community with the latest research in the blockchain space.
Unfortunately, a lot of this research is overlooked due to the massive numbers of papers being generated and the way they are being promoted and published. To tackle this issue, we’ve put together a categorized list of academic papers that can guide our subscribers and keep them up to date.”
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