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Issue #110
Paper of the Week:
TLDR:
To eliminate the unnecessary waste of energy and computing power in Bitcoin, this paper develops a novel proof-of-stake consensus in the permissionless setting.
Among other features, the design achieves the “best possible” unpredictability for permissionless proof-of-stake protocols.
Predictability can be abused by the attackers for launching strengthened version of multiple attacks such as selfish-mining and bribing, against proof-of-stake systems.
This work inspired by Bitcoin’s “block-by-block” design and shows that a direct and natural mimic of Bitcoin’s design via proof-of-stake is secure if the majority 73% of stake is honest.
The result relies on an interesting upper bound of extending proof-of-stake blockchain established: players (who may extend all chains) can generate blockchain at most 2.72× faster than playing the basic strategy of extending the longest chain.
A novel strategy called “D-distance-greedy” strategy is introduced, which enables to construct a class of secure proof-of-stake blockchain protocols, against an arbitrary adversary, even assuming much smaller (than 73% of) stake is honest.
To enable a thorough security analysis in the cryptographic setting, this work develops several new techniques: for example, to show the chain growth property, it represents the chain extension process via a Markov chain, and then develops a random walk on the Markov chain; to prove the common prefix property, it introduces a new concept called “virtual chains”, and then presents a reduction from the regular version of common prefix to “common prefix w.r.t. virtual chains”.
Authors: Lei Fan*, Jonathan Katz†, Phuc Thai‡, and Hong-Sheng Zhou‡,
Affiliations: * Shanghai Jiaotong University, † University of Maryland, and ‡ Virginia Commonwealth University.
Security:
1. Paper Title: Legendre PRF (Multiple) Key Attacks and the Power of Preprocessing.
Summary: This multiple-key attack might be of interest in the Ethereum context, since recovering many keys simultaneously maximizes an attacker’s profit.
Authors: Alexander May* and Floyd Zweydinger*
Affiliations: * Ruhr University Bochum.
2. Paper Title: LEO: A Programming Language for Formally Verified, Zero-Knowledge Applications.
Summary: A statically-typed functional programming language, built with intuitive semantics that enable users to write decentralized applications the attest to the correctness of their offline compilation and execution.
Authors: Collin Chin*, Howard Wu*, Raymond Chu*, Alessandro Coglio*, Eric McCarthy*, and Eric Smith*,
Affiliations: * Aleo.
3. Paper Title: A Trustless GQ Multi-Signature Scheme with Identifiable Abort.
Summary: A trapdoor less GQ multi-signature scheme with identifiable abort property and only 4 rounds of interaction in the signing phase, secure in the dishonest majority model.
Authors: Handong Cui* and Tsz Hon Yuen*,
Affiliations: * The University of Hong Kong.
4. Paper Title: VerLoc: Verifiable Localization in Decentralized Systems.
Summary: This paper tackles an open challenge: reliably determining the geo-location of nodes in decentralized networks, considering adversarial settings and without depending on any trusted parties.
Authors: Katharina Kohls* and Claudia Diaz†,
Affiliations: * Radboud University Nijmegen and † KU Leuven.
5. Paper Title: SCSGuard: Deep Scam Detection for Ethereum Smart Contracts.
Summary: A novel deep learning scam detection framework that harnesses the automatically extractable bytecodes of smart contracts as their new features.
Authors: Huiwen Hu* and Yuedong Xu*,
Affiliations: * Fudan University.
Privacy:
No papers.
Scalability:
No papers.
Proofs:
No papers.
Consensus:
1. Paper Title: Multi-Threshold Byzantine Fault Tolerance.
Summary: A generalized version of the BFT problem, which defines fault thresholds separately for safety and liveness under synchrony and asynchrony (or partial-synchrony), respectively.
Authors: Atsuki Momose* and Ling Ren†,
Affiliations: * Nagoya University and † University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
2. Paper Title: Pravuil: Global Consensus for a United World.
Summary: A robust, secure, and scalable consensus protocol for a permissionless blockchain suitable for deployment in an adversarial environment such as the Internet.
Authors: David Cerezo Sánchez*,
Affiliations: * Catalopia.
Tokenomics:
1. Paper Title: While Stability Lasts: A Stochastic Model of Stablecoins.
Summary: A new stochastic model of over-collateralized stablecoins with an endogenous price.
Authors: Ariah Klages-Mundt* and Andreea Minca*,
Affiliations: * Cornell University.
2. Paper Title: Should Central Banks Use Distributed Ledger Technology and Digital Currencies to Advance Financial Inclusion?
Summary: This paper examines how central banks might use distributed ledger technology (DLT) to improve access to safe and affordable financial products and services.
Authors: Michael S. Barr*, Adrienne A. Harris*, Lev Menand†, and Karin Thrasher*,
Affiliations: * University of Michigan and † Columbia University.
Research Talks:
Upcoming Events:
Decentralising the Internet with IPFS and Filecoin workshop at IFIP Networking 2021.
ACM Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2021). Call for Papers
Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology (CBT 2021). Call for Papers
Jobs:
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