Issue #20
Paper of the Week:
Paper Title: Bitcoin Security under Temporary Dishonest Majority.
TLDR:
This contribution proves that Bitcoin is secure under temporary dishonest majority and extends the work of Garay et al. in several dimensions.
Initially, it extends the work of Garay et al. by allowing a temporary dishonest majority while providing a formal analysis and investigation under which circumstances Bitcoin is secure when the honest majority holds only on expectation.
It also incorporates a third type of nodes; a group of nodes that are unable to follow the protocol - in comparison to the honest and dishonest ones.
In addition, it introduce a parameter c that upper bounds the mining power of the adversary over the mining power of the honest nodes, hence, allowing to clearly capture the correlation between this parameter and the advantage of the adversary when it deviates from the honest protocol execution.
Moreover, network delays are studied as they significantly affect the performance and security. The results show that the upper bound on this third type of nodes heavily depends on the maximum allowed message delay.
Furthermore, message losses are taken into consideration, presenting an analysis of a synchronous model.
Authors: Georgia Avarikioti*, Lukas Kappeli*, Yuyi Wang*, and Roger Wattenhofer*,
Affiliations: * ETH.
Security:
1. Paper Title: The Rush Dilemma: Attacking and Repairing Smart Contracts on Forking Blockchains.
Summary: Should I rush sending protocol’s messages based on the current view of the blockchain, or rather wait that a message is confirmed on the chain before sending the next one?
Authors: Vincenzo Botta*, Daniele Friolo†, Daniele Venturi†, and Ivan Visconti*,
Affiliations: * Sapienza University of Rome and † University of Salerno.
2. Paper Title: A Taxonomic Approach to Understanding Emerging Blockchain Identity Management Systems.
Summary: This work breaks down identifier and credential architectures, discusses their reliance to blockchains, and possible combination patterns.
Authors: Loïc Lesavre*, Priam Varin*, Peter Mell*, Michael Davidson*, and James Shook*,
Affiliations: * NIST.
Privacy:
1. Paper Title: HoneyBadgerMPC and AsynchroMix: Practical Asynchronous MPC and its Application to Anonymous Communication.
Summary: A new MPC implementation, HoneyBadgerMPC, that combines a robust online phase with an optimistic offline phase that is efficient enough to run continuously alongside the online phase.
Authors: Donghang Lu†, Thomas Yurek*, Samarth Kulshreshtha*, Rahul Govind*, Rahul Mahadev*, Aniket Kate†, Andrew Miller*,
Affiliations: * University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and † Purdue University.
Scalability:
1. Paper Title: Kadcast: A Structured Approach to Broadcast in Blockchain Networks.
Summary: A new protocol for fast, efficient, and secure block propagation for the Bitcoin network.
Authors: Elias Rohrer and Florian Tschorsch,
Affiliations: * Technical University of Berlin.
2. Paper Title: On the optionality and fairness of Atomic Swaps.
Summary: This work investigates the unfairness of Atomic Swap and shows that an Atomic Swap is equivalent to a premium-free American Call Option, and Atomic Swap is unfair to the participant.
Authors: Runchao Han*†, Haoyu Lin, and Jiangshan Yu*,
Affiliations: * Monash University and † CSIRO-Data61
Proofs:
No papers.
Consensus Protocols:
1. Paper Title: Blockguard: Adaptive Blockchain Security.
Summary: With adaptive security, this work presents a composite blockguard algorithm that assembles a committee from groups of peers that maintain independent ledgers and a dynamic blockguard algorithm which selects a committee from the processes that most recently wrote to the shared ledger.
Authors: Shishir Rai*, Kendric Hood*, Mikhail Nesterenko*, and Gokarna Sharma*,
Affiliations: * Kent State University.
2. Paper Title: HotPoW: Finality from Proof-of-Work Quorums.
Summary: A protocol that finds consensus over a distributed log without requiring predefined identities and can scale at least as well as practical blockchain protocols and much better than Byzantine fault tolerance protocols.
Authors: Patrik Keller* and Rainer Böhme*,
Affiliations: * University of Innsbruck.
Tokenomics:
1. Paper Title: Industry Competition: The Blockchain Versus Centralized Authority.
Summary: This work provides answers to the widespread questions, such as “Why do we need the blockchain technology even though we already have a centralized intermediary?”
Authors: Jun Aoyagi*,
Affiliations: * University of California, Berkeley.
2. Paper Title: Regulatory Technology - Eight Policy Recommendations.
Summary: This contribution identifies eightpolicy recommendations to inform the development of RegTech.
Authors: Eva Micheler* and Johannes Jiang*,
Affiliations: * London School of Economics.
3. Paper Title: Venture Capital and the Performance of BlockchainTechnology-Based Firms: Evidence from Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs).
Summary: This paper assesses blockchain technology-based firms (BTBFs) post-ICO performance in terms of growth, utilization, and profits and employ econometric methods to control for the endogeneity inherent in VC financing.
Authors: Christian Fisch* and Paul P. Momtaz†,
Affiliations: * University of Trier and † UCLA.
4. Paper Title: Why Do Public Blockchains Need Formal and Effective Internal Governance Mechanisms?
Summary: This article seeks to critically investigate the internal governance of public blockchain systems.
Authors: Karen Yeung* and David Galindo*,
Affiliations: * University of Birmingham.
Conferences:
Sep 02-05 - International Summer School on Security & Privacy for Blockchains and Distributed Ledger Technologies (Vienna)
Oct 05-06 Cryptoeconomic Systems Summit by MIT Media Lab (Cambridge, MA)
Oct 21-23 - Advances in Financial Technologies (Zurich) - Call for Papers
Oct 28-29 - CryptoEconomics Security Conference (Berkeley, CA) - Call for Papers
Jobs:
Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Security, Privacy, Blockchain, Machine Learning - Liquidity Network
Researcher, Security Modelling and Distributed Protocol Design - Dfinity
“Significant research in the blockchain space is constantly being achieved by academic researchers. 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. We’ve put together a categorized list of academic papers that can guide our subscribers and keep them up to date.”
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