Issue #83
Paper of the Week:
Paper Title: Publicly Verifiable Zero Knowledge from (Collapsing) Blockchains.
TLDR:
Goyal and Goyal proposed the first – and currently only– construction of a publicly verifiable zero-knowledge (pvZK) proof system that leverages a blockchain as a setup assumption.
Such construction can be instantiated only through proof-of-stake blockchains and presents a few more limitations and assumptions: (1) the adversary can only perform static corruption of the stakeholders, (2) keys of the stakeholders must also allow for encryption and (3) honest stakeholders must never leak their secret keys (even when no stake is left with respect to those keys).
This work shows that, even if all the above limitations/assumptions hold, a malicious verifier could still violate the zero-knowledge property by leveraging smart contracts.
The work shows an “attack of the clones” that allows a malicious verifier to clone some of the stakeholder capabilities via a smart contract that is designed after the proof is received from the prover.
This leaves open the question of constructing publicly verifiable zero-knowledge proofs from blockchains. Moreover it raises the issue of using blockchains as setup assumptions since they evolve over time and could even become unreliable in the future.
Next, a publicly verifiable zero-knowledge proof system is provided, based on any blockchain (i.e., not only proof-of-stake) that, very roughly, satisfies the following unpredictability property.
The proof system is secure against a verifier/prover that can corrupt blockchain players adaptively. In particular, it remains zero knowledge even if the blockchain eventually collapses and all blockchain players are controlled by the zero-knowledge adversary.
Authors: Alessandra Scafuro*, Luisa Siniscalchi†, and Ivan Visconti‡,
Affiliations: * NCSU, † Concordium Blockchain Research Center, and ‡ Universita` di Salerno.
Security:
1. Paper Title: Modelling Attacks in Blockchain Systems using Petri Nets.
Summary: This work explores different vulnerabilities in current blockchain systems and analyses the threats that various theoretical and practical attacks in the blockchain expose.
Authors: Md. Atik Shahriar*, Faisal Haque Bappy*, A. K. M. Fakhrul Hossain*, Dayamoy Datta Saikat*, Md Sadek Ferdous*†, Mohammad Jabed M. Chowdhury‡ and Md Zakirul Alam Bhuiyan§,
Affiliations: * Shahjalal University of Science & Technology, † Imperial College London, ‡ La Trobe University, and § Fordham University.
Privacy:
No papers.
Scalability:
1. Paper Title: Secure Regenerating Codes for Reducing Storage and Bootstrap Costs in Sharded Blockchains.
Summary: This paper aims to consider a new protocol, which aims to decrease the storage cost at the miners.
Authors: Divija Swetha Gadiraju*, V. Lalitha*, and Vaneet Aggarwal†,
Affiliations: * IIIT Hyderabad and † Purdue University.
Proofs:
Check out paper of the week.
Consensus:
1. Paper Title: On Broadcast in Generalized Network and Adversarial Models.
Summary: This paper investigates the achievability of broadcast in general networks, i.e., networks where only some subsets of minicast channels may be available.
Authors: Chen-Da Liu-Zhang*, Varun Maram*, and Ueli Maurer*
Affiliations: * ETH Zurich.
Tokenomics:
1. Paper Title: 3rd Global Cryptoasset Benchmarking Study.
Summary: The research findings suggest that the industry has entered a growth stage despite the notable headwinds the cryptoasset markets had encountered since 2018.
Authors: Apolline Blandin*, Gina Pieters†, Yue Wu*, Thomas Eisermann*, Anton Dek*, Sean Taylor*, Damaris Njoki,
Affiliations: * University of Cambridge and † University of Chicago.
2. Paper Title: Coins for Bombs - Does Bitcoin Finance Terrorist Attacks?
Summary: This work shows that there is evidence of abnormal transfers concentrated around large terrorist attacks.
Authors: Dan Amiram*, Bjørn N. Jørgensen†, and Daniel Rabetti*,
Affiliations: * Tel Aviv University and † London School of Economics & Political Science.
Conferences, Journals, & CFPs:
Conferences’ Videos:
Jobs:
RFPs:
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