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Issue #101
Paper of the Week:
Paper Title: Non-interactive half-aggregation of EdDSA and variants of Schnorr signatures.
TLDR:
Schnorr’s signature scheme provides an elegant method to derive signatures with security rooted in the hardness of the discrete logarithm problem, which is a well-studied assumption and conducive to efficient cryptography.
However, unlike pairing-based schemes which allow arbitrarily many signatures to be aggregated to a single constant sized signature, achieving significant non-interactive compression for Schnorr signatures and their variants has remained elusive.
This work shows how to compress a set of independent EdDSA/Schnorr signatures to roughly half their naive size.
This technique does not employ generic succinct proofs; it is agnostic to both the hash function as well as the specific representation of the group used to instantiate the signature scheme.
The paper demonstrates via an implementation that the proposed aggregation scheme is indeed practical.
Additionally, it gives strong evidence that achieving better compression would imply proving statements specific to the hash function in Schnorr’s scheme, which would entail significant effort for standardized schemes such as SHA2 in EdDSA.
Among the others, the proposed solution has direct applications to compressing Ed25519-based blockchain blocks because transactions are independent and normally users do not interact with each other.
Authors: Konstantinos Chalkias*, François Garillot*, Yashvanth Kondi†, and Valeria Nikolaenko*
Affiliations: * Novi/Facebook and † Northeastern University.
Security:
1. Paper Title: ESCORT: Ethereum Smart COntRacTs Vulnerability Detection using Deep Neural Network and Transfer Learning.
Summary: The first Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based vulnerability detection framework for Ethereum smart contracts that supports lightweight transfer learning on unseen security vulnerabilities, thus is extensible and generalizable.
Authors: Oliver Lutz*, Huili Chen†, Hossein Fereidooni‡, Christoph Sendner*, Alexandra Dmitrienko*, Ahmad Reza Sadeghi‡, and Farinaz Koushanfar†,
Affiliations: * University of Würzburg, † University of California, San-Diego, and ‡ Technical University of Darmstadt.
Privacy:
1. Paper Title: A Novel Framework for the Analysis of Unknown Transactions in Bitcoin: Theory, Model, and Experimental Results.
Summary: A novel approach based on sound graph theory for identifying transaction inputs and outputs.
Authors: Maurantonio Caprolu*, Matteo Pontecorvi†, Matteo Signorini†, Carlos Segarra‡ and Roberto Di Pietro*,
Affiliations: * Hamad Bin Khalifa University, † NOKIA Bell Labs, and ‡ Imperial College London.
Scalability:
No papers.
Proofs:
1. Paper Title: Nova: Recursive Zero-Knowledge Arguments from Folding Schemes.
Summary: A new zero-knowledge proof system for incremental computations, where for an N-sized computation with C-sized steps, the prover runs in Oλ(N) time to produce Oλ(logC)-sized proofs that can be verified in Oλ(C) time.
Authors: Abhiram Kothapalli*†, Srinath Setty*, Ioanna Tzialla‡
Affiliations: * Microsoft Research, † Carnegie Mellon University, and ‡ New York University.
Consensus:
1. Paper Title: Bolt-Dumbo Transformer: Asynchronous Consensus As Fast As Pipelined BFT.
Summary: A new practical generic framework to attain randomized asynchronous BFT protocols with optimistic deterministic executions.
Authors: Yuan Lu*, Zhenliang Lu, and Qiang Tang†,
Affiliations: * Chinese Academy of Sciences and † The University of Sydney.
Tokenomics:
1. Paper Title: To Mine or to Trade? An Empirical Study of Bitcoin Exchange and Mining Markets.
Summary: As mining significantly determines the reliability and security of the operation of the Bitcoin system, it’s important to understand whether the trading market can influence the investment in mining.
Authors: Chen Jin*, Bowen Lou†, and Jiding Zhang‡,
Affiliations: * National University of Singapore, † University of Connecticut, and ‡ New York University.
2. Paper Title: Tradeoffs in Permissioned vs Permissionless Blockchains: Trust and Performance.
Summary: A model of transaction safety in permissioned and permissionless blockchains to study the tradeoff and find that in several settings there may be no tradeoff at all.
Authors: Yannis Bakos* and Hanna Halaburda*,
Affiliations: * New York University.
Upcoming Events:
Decentralising the Internet with IPFS and Filecoin workshop at IFIP Networking 2021.
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