Issue #14
Paper of the Week
Paper Title: Arcula: A Secure Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet for Multi-asset Blockchains.
TLDR:
A new hierarchical and deterministic wallet (HDW) that outperforms the state of the art BIP32.
Implements arbitrarily complex access hierarchies, and allows for their dynamic modifications.
Built on provably secure cryptographic primitives, in particular, is secure against privilege escalation. An attacker that compromises an arbitrary number of users in the hierarchy can not escalate his privileges and compromise any user higher in the hierarchy.
Develops a key indistinguishable deterministic hierarchical key assignment (DHKA) scheme that is used to deterministically generate the set of cryptographic keys at the core of our wallet.
Ties the identities of users to their public signing keys without requiring additional secret information; as identity-based hierarchical signatures but explicitly designed for the existing blockchains.
Allows the derivation of a new address for receiving payments in an entirely untrusted environment, recovery of every cryptographic key from an initial seed provided by the user, and also spending coins on behalf of users lower in the hierarchy.
Compatible with any blockchain that enables the signature verification of arbitrary messages.
Arcula is compared to BIP32 at the three different security and privacy scenarios: Public Chain Code, Private Chain Code, and Hardened Derivation.
Authors: Adriano Di Luzio*, Danilo Francati*, and Giuseppe Ateniese*,
Affiliations: * Stevens Institute of Technology.
This Week in Security:
1. Paper Title: Secure Architectures Implementing Trusted Coalitions for Blockchained Distributed Learning (TCLearn).
Summary: A novel scalable security architectures for distributed Learning based on either public or permissioned blockchains to provide distributed deep learning with increasing levels of security and privacy preservation.
Authors: Sébastien Lugan*, Paul Desbordes*, Luis Xavier Ramos Tormo†, Axel Legay*, and Benoît Macq*,
Affiliations: * UCLouvain and † MIT.
This Week in Privacy:
1. Paper Title: Public Ledger for Sensitive Data.
Summary: A practical construction of a scheme that allows tightly-managed sharing of sensitive information with one-time-access property and fast revocation, combined with full support of public auditing.
Authors: Riccardo Longo* and Massimiliano Sala*,
Affiliations: * University of Trento.
This Week in Scalability:
No Papers
This Week in Proofs:
No Papers
This Week in Consensus Protocols:
1. Paper Title: A Secure Consensus Protocol for Sidechains.
Summary: A BFT-based consensus algorithm specially designed for sidechain. This work presents performance and rigorous security proofs.
Authors: Fangyu Gai*, Cesar Grajales*, Jianyu Niu*, and Chen Feng*,
Affiliations: * University of British Columbia.
2. Paper Title: PREStO: A Systematic Framework for Blockchain Consensus Protocols.
Summary: A framework that aids the communication between stakeholders of different backgrounds to identify research challenges and opportunities for blockchain protocols in a systematic way.
Authors: Stefanos Leonardos*, Daniël Reijsbergen*, and Georgios Piliouras*,
Affiliations: * Singapore University of Technology and Design.
3. Paper Title: MaGPoS - A novel decentralized consensus mechanism combining magnetism and proof of stake.
Summary: A new iteration of PoS based on the quantum mechanics of a lattice of magnetic dipoles in a nano-scale thin film.
Authors: Tommy Mckinnon*,
Affiliations: * Hyperevo.
This Week in Tokenomics:
No Papers
Notable Conferences:
Oct 28-29 - CryptoEconomics Security Conference (Berkeley) - Call for Papers
Sep 02-05 - International Summer School on Security & Privacy for Blockchains and Distributed Ledger Technologies (Vienna)
Research Jobs:
“Significant research in the blockchain space is constantly being achieved by academic researchers. 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. 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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