2,793 research outputs found
Can a Public Blockchain Keep a Secret?
Blockchains are gaining traction and acceptance, not just for cryptocurrencies, but increasingly as an architecture for distributed computing. In this work we seek solutions that allow a \emph{public} blockchain to act as a trusted long-term repository of secret information: Our goal is to deposit a secret with the blockchain, specify how it is to be used (e.g., the conditions under which it is released), and have the blockchain keep the secret and use it only in the specified manner (e.g., release only it once the conditions are met). This simple functionality enables many powerful applications, including signing statements on behalf of the blockchain, using it as the control plane for a storage system, performing decentralized program-obfuscation-as-a-service, and many more.
Using proactive secret sharing techniques, we present a scalable solution for implementing this functionality on a public blockchain, in the presence of a mobile adversary controlling a small minority of the participants. The main challenge is that, on the one hand, scalability requires that we use small committees to represent the entire system, but, on the other hand, a mobile adversary may be able to corrupt the entire committee if it is small. For this reason, existing proactive secret sharing solutions are either non-scalable or insecure in our setting.
We approach this challenge via player replaceability , which ensures the committee is anonymous until after it performs its actions. Our main technical contribution is a system that allows sharing and re-sharing of secrets among the members of small dynamic committees, without knowing who they are until after they perform their actions and erase their secrets. Our solution handles a fully mobile adversary corrupting roughly 1/4 of the participants at any time, and is scalable in terms of both the number of parties and the number of time intervals
vetKeys: How a Blockchain Can Keep Many Secrets
We propose a new cryptographic primitive called verifiably encrypted threshold key derivation (vetKD) that extends identity-based encryption with a decentralized way of deriving decryption keys. We show how vetKD can be leveraged on modern blockchains to build scalable decentralized applications (or dapps ) for a variety of purposes, including preventing front-running attacks on decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, end-to-end encryption for decentralized messaging and social networks (SocialFi), cross-chain bridges, as well as advanced cryptographic primitives such as witness encryption and one-time programs that previously could only be built from secure hardware or using a trusted third party. And all of that by secret-sharing just a single secret key..
Integrating Blockchain into Supply Chain Safeguarded by PUF-enabled RFID.
Due to globalization, supply chain networks are moving towards higher complexity and becoming vulnerable to various kinds of attacks such as counterfeiting, information tampering, and so on. Appropriate approaches are necessary to tackle different types of attacks and to ensure the required supply chain security. In this thesis, we have addressed the product counterfeiting issue using Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) enabled Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag. Applying blockchain technology to supply chain can add many useful features to the supply chain, such as decentralization and immutability. On the other hand, linking supply chain products to blockchain can bring transparency, traceability, and non-repudiation as well. As a preferred alternative to the traditional centralized databases, blockchain can address certain supply chain management issues such as complicated record-keeping, provenance tracking of the products, and distrust among different supply chain parties. In this research, blockchain technology has been leveraged to support anticounterfeiting and deal with data attacks. We have also introduced a reputation-based consensus algorithm for the blockchain which is less resource-intensive and thus will not impose additional cost on supply chain products indirectly. In the same research direction, we have devised our system architecture that is suitable for lightweight supply chain devices. The proposed three protocols, namely: registration protocol, verification protocol, and transaction protocol along with the blockchain technology help to transfer the ownership of the authentic product and keep the sensitive supply chain information safe. An encryption-based secret sharing technique has also been introduced to assist data protection
FinBook: literary content as digital commodity
This short essay explains the significance of the FinBook intervention, and invites the reader to participate. We have associated each chapter within this book with a financial robot (FinBot), and created a market whereby book content will be traded with financial securities. As human labour increasingly consists of unstable and uncertain work practices and as algorithms replace people on the virtual trading floors of the worlds markets, we see members of society taking advantage of FinBots to invest and make extra funds. Bots of all kinds are making financial decisions for us, searching online on our behalf to help us invest, to consume products and services. Our contribution to this compilation is to turn the collection of chapters in this book into a dynamic investment portfolio, and thereby play out what might happen to the process of buying and consuming literature in the not-so-distant future. By attaching identities (through QR codes) to each chapter, we create a market in which the chapter can ‘perform’. Our FinBots will trade based on features extracted from the authors’ words in this book: the political, ethical and cultural values embedded in the work, and the extent to which the FinBots share authors’ concerns; and the performance of chapters amongst those human and non-human actors that make up the market, and readership. In short, the FinBook model turns our work and the work of our co-authors into an investment portfolio, mediated by the market and the attention of readers. By creating a digital economy specifically around the content of online texts, our chapter and the FinBook platform aims to challenge the reader to consider how their personal values align them with individual articles, and how these become contested as they perform different value judgements about the financial performance of each chapter and the book as a whole. At the same time, by introducing ‘autonomous’ trading bots, we also explore the different ‘network’ affordances that differ between paper based books that’s scarcity is developed through analogue form, and digital forms of books whose uniqueness is reached through encryption. We thereby speak to wider questions about the conditions of an aggressive market in which algorithms subject cultural and intellectual items – books – to economic parameters, and the increasing ubiquity of data bots as actors in our social, political, economic and cultural lives. We understand that our marketization of literature may be an uncomfortable juxtaposition against the conventionally-imagined way a book is created, enjoyed and shared: it is intended to be
ARCHANGEL: Tamper-proofing Video Archives using Temporal Content Hashes on the Blockchain
We present ARCHANGEL; a novel distributed ledger based system for assuring
the long-term integrity of digital video archives. First, we describe a novel
deep network architecture for computing compact temporal content hashes (TCHs)
from audio-visual streams with durations of minutes or hours. Our TCHs are
sensitive to accidental or malicious content modification (tampering) but
invariant to the codec used to encode the video. This is necessary due to the
curatorial requirement for archives to format shift video over time to ensure
future accessibility. Second, we describe how the TCHs (and the models used to
derive them) are secured via a proof-of-authority blockchain distributed across
multiple independent archives. We report on the efficacy of ARCHANGEL within
the context of a trial deployment in which the national government archives of
the United Kingdom, Estonia and Norway participated.Comment: Accepted to CVPR Blockchain Workshop 201
ARPA Whitepaper
We propose a secure computation solution for blockchain networks. The
correctness of computation is verifiable even under malicious majority
condition using information-theoretic Message Authentication Code (MAC), and
the privacy is preserved using Secret-Sharing. With state-of-the-art multiparty
computation protocol and a layer2 solution, our privacy-preserving computation
guarantees data security on blockchain, cryptographically, while reducing the
heavy-lifting computation job to a few nodes. This breakthrough has several
implications on the future of decentralized networks. First, secure computation
can be used to support Private Smart Contracts, where consensus is reached
without exposing the information in the public contract. Second, it enables
data to be shared and used in trustless network, without disclosing the raw
data during data-at-use, where data ownership and data usage is safely
separated. Last but not least, computation and verification processes are
separated, which can be perceived as computational sharding, this effectively
makes the transaction processing speed linear to the number of participating
nodes. Our objective is to deploy our secure computation network as an layer2
solution to any blockchain system. Smart Contracts\cite{smartcontract} will be
used as bridge to link the blockchain and computation networks. Additionally,
they will be used as verifier to ensure that outsourced computation is
completed correctly. In order to achieve this, we first develop a general MPC
network with advanced features, such as: 1) Secure Computation, 2) Off-chain
Computation, 3) Verifiable Computation, and 4)Support dApps' needs like
privacy-preserving data exchange
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