18,684 research outputs found
Building Regular Registers with Rational Malicious Servers and Anonymous Clients
The paper addresses the problem of emulating a regular register in a synchronous distributed system where clients invoking and operations are anonymous while server processes maintaining the state of the register may be compromised by rational adversaries (i.e., a server might behave as rational malicious Byzantine process). We first model our problem as a Bayesian game between a client and a rational malicious server where the equilibrium depends on the decisions of the malicious server (behave correctly and not be detected by clients vs returning a wrong register value to clients with the risk of being detected and then excluded by the computation). We prove such equilibrium exists and finally we design a protocol implementing the regular register that forces the rational malicious server to behave correctly
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
FairLedger: A Fair Blockchain Protocol for Financial Institutions
Financial institutions are currently looking into technologies for
permissioned blockchains. A major effort in this direction is Hyperledger, an
open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation and backed by a consortium
of over a hundred companies. A key component in permissioned blockchain
protocols is a byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus engine that orders
transactions. However, currently available BFT solutions in Hyperledger (as
well as in the literature at large) are inadequate for financial settings; they
are not designed to ensure fairness or to tolerate selfish behavior that arises
when financial institutions strive to maximize their own profit.
We present FairLedger, a permissioned blockchain BFT protocol, which is fair,
designed to deal with rational behavior, and, no less important, easy to
understand and implement. The secret sauce of our protocol is a new
communication abstraction, called detectable all-to-all (DA2A), which allows us
to detect participants (byzantine or rational) that deviate from the protocol,
and punish them. We implement FairLedger in the Hyperledger open source
project, using Iroha framework, one of the biggest projects therein. To
evaluate FairLegder's performance, we also implement it in the PBFT framework
and compare the two protocols. Our results show that in failure-free scenarios
FairLedger achieves better throughput than both Iroha's implementation and PBFT
in wide-area settings
Computer Science and Game Theory: A Brief Survey
There has been a remarkable increase in work at the interface of computer
science and game theory in the past decade. In this article I survey some of
the main themes of work in the area, with a focus on the work in computer
science. Given the length constraints, I make no attempt at being
comprehensive, especially since other surveys are also available, and a
comprehensive survey book will appear shortly.Comment: To appear; Palgrave Dictionary of Economic
Respect as the Ethic of the Open Society
Karl Popper’s description of the open society in terms of respect,
rather than mere tolerance, appears to be highly relevant today. Although
he never explicitly addressed the issues of multiculturalism and valuepluralism
in contemporary societies, Popper’s idea of respect provides an
effective way to approach them. For, on the one hand, it may help to reframe
current debates about multiculturalism in clearer terms. On the other, it
provides a critical assessment of the widespread relativism that presents
itself as a sort of panacea of all theoretical and practical problems posed by
the cohabitation of groups sharing different values and worldviews. On
closer scrutiny, political relativism – just as its epistemological counterpart
– is not only entirely inadequate but also dangerous for the very existence of
the open society. A serious look at the present situation suggests, rather, the
adoption of a principle of reciprocity that is consistent with Popper’s critical
pluralism and might prove to be effective in addressing the problems faced
by a multicultural society
Lower Bounds on Implementing Robust and Resilient Mediators
We consider games that have (k,t)-robust equilibria when played with a
mediator, where an equilibrium is (k,t)-robust if it tolerates deviations by
coalitions of size up to k and deviations by up to players with unknown
utilities. We prove lower bounds that match upper bounds on the ability to
implement such mediators using cheap talk (that is, just allowing communication
among the players). The bounds depend on (a) the relationship between k, t, and
n, the total number of players in the system; (b) whether players know the
exact utilities of other players; (c) whether there are broadcast channels or
just point-to-point channels; (d) whether cryptography is available; and (e)
whether the game has a k+t$ players, guarantees that every player gets a
worse outcome than they do with the equilibrium strategy
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