This Week in Blockchain Research Issue #118

Issue #118

zk Capital

Jul 23, 2021

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Issue #118

Paper of the Week:

Paper Title: Secure Access Control for DAG-based Distributed Ledgers.

TLDR:
Access control is a fundamental component of the design of distributed ledgers, influencing many aspects of their design, such as fairness, efficiency, traditional notions of network security, and adversarial attacks such as Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks.
This work considers the security of a recently proposed access control protocol for Directed Acyclic Graph-based distributed ledgers.
It presents a number of attack scenarios and potential vulnerabilities of the protocol and introduces a number of additional features which enhance its resilience.
Specifically, a blacklisting algorithm, which is based on a reputation-weighted threshold, is introduced to handle both spamming and multi-rate malicious attackers.
The introduction of a solidification request component is also introduced to ensure the fairness and consistency of network in the presence of attacks.
Finally, a timestamp component is also introduced to maintain the consistency of the network in the presence of multi-rate attackers.
Simulations to illustrate the efficacy and robustness of the revised protocol are also described.

Authors: L. Zhao*, L. Vigneri†, A. Cullen*, W. Sanders†, P. Ferraro*, and R. Shorten*

Affiliations: * Imperial College London and † IOTA Foundation.

Security:

1. Paper Title: Assessment of Quantum Threat To Bitcoin and Derived Cryptocurrencies.

Summary: When will a quantum computer be powerful enough to execute Shor’s algorithm? How fast would a quantum computer need to be to break a specific cryptocurrency?

Authors: Stephen Holmes* and Liqun Chen*,

Affiliations: * University of Surrey.

Privacy:

1. Paper Title: Anonymous Blockchain-based System for Consortium.

Summary: A Multi-center Anonymous Blockchain-based (MAB) system, with joint management for the consortium and privacy protection for the participants.

Authors: Qin Wang*†, Shiping Chen†, and Yang Xiang*,

Affiliations: * Swinburne University of Technology and † CSIRO Data61.

Scalability:

1. Paper Title: Improving Blockchain Consistency by Assigning Weights to Random Blocks.

Summary: Enabling a much faster (10 ∼ 50 times with normal parameter settings) block production rate than Nakamoto protocol under the same security guarantee with the same proportion of malicious mining power.

Authors: Qing Zhang*, Xueping Gong*, Huizhong Li†, Hao Wu†, and Jiheng Zhang*,

Affiliations: * The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and † WeBank Co., Ltd.

Proofs:

1. Paper Title: Constant-Overhead Zero-Knowledge for RAM Programs.

Summary: A ZK proof in which the communication complexity as well as the running times of the prover and verifier scale linearly in the size of the memory N and the running time T of the underlying RAM program.

Authors: Nicholas Franzese*, Jonathan Katz†, Steve Lu‡, Rafail Ostrovsky§, Xiao Wang*, and Chenkai Weng*,

Affiliations: * Northwestern University, † University of Maryland, ‡ Stealth Software Technologies, Inc., and § UCLA.

2. Paper Title: Shorter and Faster Post-Quantum Designated-Verifier zkSNARKs from Lattices.

Summary: The focus in this work is on post-quantum zkSNARKs, with a focus on minimizing proof size.

Authors: Yuval Ishai*, Hang Su†, and David J. Wu‡.

Affiliations: * Technion, † University of Virginia, and ‡ UT Austin.

Consensus:

No papers.

Tokenomics:

1. Paper Title: A Cooperative Optimal Mining Model for Bitcoin.

Summary: Analyzing Bitcoin mining from the perspective of a game and proposing an optimal mining model that maximizes profits of pools and miners.

Authors: David Lajeunesse* and Hugo D. Scolnik*,

Affiliations: * University of Buenos Aires.

2. Paper Title: Factors determining maximum energy consumption of Bitcoin miners.

Summary: A basic equation that determines energy consumption based on some specific factors: minting, transaction fees, exchange rate, energy price, and amortization cost.

Authors: Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona*,

Affiliations: * undisclosed.

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