14,747 research outputs found
Quantum attacks on Bitcoin, and how to protect against them
The key cryptographic protocols used to secure the internet and financial
transactions of today are all susceptible to attack by the development of a
sufficiently large quantum computer. One particular area at risk are
cryptocurrencies, a market currently worth over 150 billion USD. We investigate
the risk of Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies, to attacks by quantum
computers. We find that the proof-of-work used by Bitcoin is relatively
resistant to substantial speedup by quantum computers in the next 10 years,
mainly because specialized ASIC miners are extremely fast compared to the
estimated clock speed of near-term quantum computers. On the other hand, the
elliptic curve signature scheme used by Bitcoin is much more at risk, and could
be completely broken by a quantum computer as early as 2027, by the most
optimistic estimates. We analyze an alternative proof-of-work called Momentum,
based on finding collisions in a hash function, that is even more resistant to
speedup by a quantum computer. We also review the available post-quantum
signature schemes to see which one would best meet the security and efficiency
requirements of blockchain applications.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures. For a rough update on the progress of Quantum
devices and prognostications on time from now to break Digital signatures,
see https://www.quantumcryptopocalypse.com/quantum-moores-law
A privacy-preserving fuzzy interest matching protocol for friends finding in social networks
Nowadays, it is very popular to make friends, share photographs, and exchange news throughout social networks. Social networks widely expand the area of people’s social connections and make communication much smoother than ever before. In a social network, there are many social groups established based on common interests among persons, such as learning group, family group, and reading group. People often describe their profiles when registering as a user in a social network. Then social networks can organize these users into groups of friends according to their profiles. However, an important issue must be considered, namely many users’ sensitive profiles could have been leaked out during this process. Therefore, it is reasonable to design a privacy-preserving friends-finding protocol in social network. Toward this goal, we design a fuzzy interest matching protocol based on private set intersection. Concretely, two candidate users can first organize their profiles into sets, then use Bloom filters to generate new data structures, and finally find the intersection sets to decide whether being friends or not in the social network. The protocol is shown to be secure in the malicious model and can be useful for practical purposes.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
In-packet Bloom filters: Design and networking applications
The Bloom filter (BF) is a well-known space-efficient data structure that
answers set membership queries with some probability of false positives. In an
attempt to solve many of the limitations of current inter-networking
architectures, some recent proposals rely on including small BFs in packet
headers for routing, security, accountability or other purposes that move
application states into the packets themselves. In this paper, we consider the
design of such in-packet Bloom filters (iBF). Our main contributions are
exploring the design space and the evaluation of a series of extensions (1) to
increase the practicality and performance of iBFs, (2) to enable
false-negative-free element deletion, and (3) to provide security enhancements.
In addition to the theoretical estimates, extensive simulations of the multiple
design parameters and implementation alternatives validate the usefulness of
the extensions, providing for enhanced and novel iBF networking applications.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, preprint submitted to Elsevier COMNET Journa
Reuse It Or Lose It: More Efficient Secure Computation Through Reuse of Encrypted Values
Two-party secure function evaluation (SFE) has become significantly more
feasible, even on resource-constrained devices, because of advances in
server-aided computation systems. However, there are still bottlenecks,
particularly in the input validation stage of a computation. Moreover, SFE
research has not yet devoted sufficient attention to the important problem of
retaining state after a computation has been performed so that expensive
processing does not have to be repeated if a similar computation is done again.
This paper presents PartialGC, an SFE system that allows the reuse of encrypted
values generated during a garbled-circuit computation. We show that using
PartialGC can reduce computation time by as much as 96% and bandwidth by as
much as 98% in comparison with previous outsourcing schemes for secure
computation. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach with two sets of
experiments, one in which the garbled circuit is evaluated on a mobile device
and one in which it is evaluated on a server. We also use PartialGC to build a
privacy-preserving "friend finder" application for Android. The reuse of
previous inputs to allow stateful evaluation represents a new way of looking at
SFE and further reduces computational barriers.Comment: 20 pages, shorter conference version published in Proceedings of the
2014 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Pages
582-596, ACM New York, NY, US
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