Issue #8
This Week in Security:
1. Paper Title: FloodXMR: Low-cost transaction flooding attack with Monero’s bulletproof protocol.
Summary: A new traceability attack on Monero and an analysis of the costs required for an attacker to conduct it.
Authors: João Otávio Massari Chervinski* and Diego Kreutz*†, and Jiangshan Yu‡,
Affiliations: * Federal University of Pampa, † CritiX/SnT University of Luxembourg, and ‡ Monash University.
2. Paper Title: UniqueChain: A Fast, Provably Secure Proof-of-Stake Based Blockchain Protocol in the Open Setting.
Summary: A fast and provably secure proof-of-stake based blockchain protocol in open setting, which executes in a slot-synchronous network and resists a mildly adaptive adversary.
Authors: Peifang Ni*†‡, Hongda Li*†‡, Xianning Meng*†‡, and Dongxue Pan*†‡,
Affiliations: * University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, † Data Assurance and Communication Security Research Center, and ‡ State Key Laboratory of Information Security.
3. Paper Title: Decentralized Trusted Computing Base for Blockchain Infrastructure Security.
Summary: This paper discusses the notion of the decentralized trusted computing base as an extension of the TCB concept in trusted computing and explores how a decentralized TCB can be useful.
Authors: Thomas Hardjono* and Ned Smith†,
Affiliations: * MIT and † Intel.
4. Paper Title: Another Look at ALGORAND.
Summary: This work shows that the claimed (proved) fork-free property in ALGORAND is not true and several assumptions are not realistic in practice.
Authors: Yongge Wang*,
Affiliations: * UNC Charlotte.
5. Paper Title: Impossibility of Full Decentralization in Permissionless Blockchains.
Summary: This paper proves that when the ratio between the resource power of the poorest and richest is close to 0, the upper bound of the probability that systems without a Sybil cost reach full decentralization is close to 0.
Authors: Yujin Kwon*, Jian Liu†, Minjeong Kim*, Dawn Song†, and Yongdae Kim*,
Affiliations: * KAIST and † University of California, Berkeley.
This Week in Privacy:
No papers.
This Week in Scalability:
1. Paper Title: Atomic Commitment Across Blockchains.
Summary: An all-or-nothing atomic cross-Chain commitment protocol that uses an open Witness Network where refund events of smart contracts are modeled as conflicting events.
Authors: Victor Zakhary*, Divyakant Agrawal*, and Amr El Abbadi*,
Affiliations: * UC Santa Barbara.
This Week in Proofs:
1. Paper Title: UC-Secure CRS Generation for SNARKs.
Summary: This works aims to enhance the CRS-generation in this protocol to achieve UC-security.
Authors: Behzad Abdolmaleki*, Karim Baghery*, Helger Lipmaa*, Janno Siim*, and Michal Zajac†,
Affiliations: * University of Tartu and † Clearmatics.
2. Paper Title: On the Efficiency of Privacy-Preserving Smart Contract Systems.
Summary: A variation of Groth and Maller's zk-SNARK work that aims to achieve UC-security and better efficiency than the ones that currently are used in Hawk and Gyges.
Authors: Karim Baghery*,
Affiliations: * University of Tartu.
This Week in Consensus Protocols:
1. Paper Title: Proof-of-Prestige: A Useful Work Reward System for Unverifiable Tasks.
Summary: A reward system that can run on top of Proof-of-Stake blockchains where coins regenerate over time.
Authors: Michał Krol*, Alberto Sonnino*, Mustafa Al-Bassam*, Argyrios Tasiopoulos*, Ioannis Psaras*,
Affiliations: * University College London.
This Week in Tokenomics:
1. Paper Title: Pricing of Mining ASIC and Its Implication to the High Volatility of Cryptocurrency Prices.
Summary: This work shows that the payouts from ASIC can be replicated by an integral of European call options, hence, the value of ASIC is increasing in the volatility of the cryptocurrency price.
Authors: Yoshinori Hashimoto and Shunya Noda†,
Affiliations: * BUIDL, Ltd and † Stanford University.
2. Paper Title: Riding the Blockchain Mania: Public Firms’ Speculative 8-K Disclosures.
Summary: Investors overreact to a firm’s first 8-K disclosure of a potential foray into Blockchain technology and that the overreaction is a function of the Bitcoin price bubble.
Authors: Stephanie F. Cheng*, Gus De Franco*, Haibo Jiang* and Pengkai Lin,
Affiliations: * Tulane University.
“Significant advancements and innovations in the blockchain space are constantly being achieved by academic researchers. We are committed to helping share and spread this research. In our newsletter, we aim to provide a list of publications that will help guide the community with the latest research in the blockchain space.
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. To tackle this issue, we’ve put together a categorized list of academic papers that can guide our subscribers and keep them up to date.”
Thanks for reading! If we missed anything, shoot us an email so that we can feature it in our next newsletter!
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