This Week in Blockchain Research

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This Week in Blockchain Research Issue #118

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This Week in Blockchain Research Issue #118

Issue #118

zk Capital
Jul 23, 2021
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This Week in Blockchain Research Issue #118

zkcapital.substack.com

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Issue #118

Paper of the Week:

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

TLDR:

  1. 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.

  2. This work considers the security of a recently proposed access control protocol for Directed Acyclic Graph-based distributed ledgers.

  3. It presents a number of attack scenarios and potential vulnerabilities of the protocol and introduces a number of additional features which enhance its resilience.

  4. Specifically, a blacklisting algorithm, which is based on a reputation-weighted threshold, is introduced to handle both spamming and multi-rate malicious attackers.

  5. The introduction of a solidification request component is also introduced to ensure the fairness and consistency of network in the presence of attacks.

  6. Finally, a timestamp component is also introduced to maintain the consistency of the network in the presence of multi-rate attackers.

  7. 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.


Research Talks:

  • Protocol Labs Research Seminars (IPFS, Filecoin, libp2p). Sign up here


Upcoming Events:

  • ACM Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2021). Call for Papers

  • Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology (CBT 2021). Call for Papers

  • 3rd International Conference on Blockchain Economics, Security and Protocols


Jobs:

  • Research Engineer, Resilient Networks Lab - Protocol Labs.

  • Protocol Engineer, CryptoEconLab - Protocol Labs.

  • Research Engineer, CryptoCompute Lab - Protocol Labs.

  • Research Scientist, CryptoEconLab - Protocol Labs.

  • Investment Associate/Analyst - Pantera Capital.

  • Bitcoin Security Research Scientist - DCI - MIT Media Lab.

  • Bitcoin Security Postdoctoral Associate - DCI - MIT Media Lab.


Thanks to our sponsor

Protocol Labs

The Protocol Labs Research team is pretty enthusiastic about making knowledge free and accessible.  If you want to see some presentations on recent research, they have a public Research Seminar Series.  You can see dozens of previous talks on YouTube, and/or sign up here to get invited to future talks.  And if your talk was featured in this newsletter, and you'd like to present it, they're welcoming requests to speak at research@protocol.ai. Join the Protocol Labs team!


This newsletter is for informational purposes only. This content does not in any way constitute an offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell any investment solution or recommendation to buy or sell a security; nor it is to be taken as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. In fact, none of the information in this or other content on zk Capital should be relied on in any manner as advice. None of the authors, contributors, or anyone else connected with zk Capital, in any way whatsoever, can be responsible for your use of the information contained in this newsletter.

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This Week in Blockchain Research Issue #118

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