An Analysis and Enumeration of the Blockchain and Future Implications

The blockchain is a relatively new technology that has grown in interest and potential research since its inception. Blockchain technology is dominated by cryptocurrency in terms of usage. Research conducted in the past few years, however, reveals blockchain has the potential to revolutionize several different industries. The blockchain consists of three major technologies: a peer-to-peer network, a distributed database, and asymmetrically encrypted transactions. The peer-to-peer network enables a decentralized, consensus-based network structure where various nodes contribute to the overall network performance. A distributed database adds additional security and immutability to the network. The process of cryptographically securing individual transactions forms a core service of the blockchain and enables semi-anonymous user network presence

Regular and almost universal hashing: an efficient implementation

Random hashing can provide guarantees regarding the performance of data structures such as hash tables---even in an adversarial setting. Many existing families of hash functions are universal: given two data objects, the probability that they have the same hash value is low given that we pick hash functions at random. However, universality fails to ensure that all hash functions are well behaved. We further require regularity: when picking data objects at random they should have a low probability of having the same hash value, for any fixed hash function. We present the efficient implementation of a family of non-cryptographic hash functions (PM+) offering good running times, good memory usage as well as distinguishing theoretical guarantees: almost universality and component-wise regularity. On a variety of platforms, our implementations are comparable to the state of the art in performance. On recent Intel processors, PM+ achieves a speed of 4.7 bytes per cycle for 32-bit outputs and 3.3 bytes per cycle for 64-bit outputs. We review vectorization through SIMD instructions (e.g., AVX2) and optimizations for superscalar execution.Comment: accepted for publication in Software: Practice and Experience in September 201

Can NSEC5 be practical for DNSSEC deployments?

NSEC5 is proposed modification to DNSSEC that simultaneously guarantees two security properties: (1) privacy against offline zone enumeration, and (2) integrity of zone contents, even if an adversary compromises the authoritative nameserver responsible for responding to DNS queries for the zone. This paper redesigns NSEC5 to make it both practical and performant. Our NSEC5 redesign features a new fast verifiable random function (VRF) based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), along with a cryptographic proof of its security. This VRF is also of independent interest, as it is being standardized by the IETF and being used by several other projects. We show how to integrate NSEC5 using our ECC-based VRF into the DNSSEC protocol, leveraging precomputation to improve performance and DNS protocol-level optimizations to shorten responses. Next, we present the first full-fledged implementation of NSEC5—extending widely-used DNS software to present a nameserver and recursive resolver that support NSEC5—and evaluate their performance under aggressive DNS query loads. Our performance results indicate that our redesigned NSEC5 can be viable even for high-throughput scenarioshttps://eprint.iacr.org/2017/099.pdfFirst author draf