6,526 research outputs found
Keeping Time-Release Secrets through Smart Contracts
A time-release protocol enables one to send secrets into a future release time. The main technical challenge lies in incorporating timing control into the protocol, especially in the absence of a central trusted party. To leverage on the regular heartbeats emitted from decen- tralized blockchains, in this paper, we advocate an incentive-based approach that combines threshold secret sharing and blockchain based smart contract. In particular, the secret is split into shares and distributed to a set of incentivized participants, with the payment settlement contractualized and enforced by the autonomous smart contract. We highlight that such ap- proach needs to achieve two goals: to reward honest participants who release their shares honestly after the release date (the “carrots”), and to punish premature leakage of the shares (the “sticks”). While it is not difficult to contractualize a carrot mechanism for punctual releases, it is not clear how to realise the stick. In the first place, it is not clear how to identify premature leakage. Our main idea is to encourage public vigilantism by incorporating an informer-bounty mechanism that pays bounty to any informer who can provide evidence of the leakage. The possibility of being punished constitute a deterrent to the misbehaviour of premature releases. Since various entities, including the owner, participants and the in- formers, might act maliciously for their own interests, there are many security requirements. In particular, to prevent a malicious owner from acting as the informer, the protocol must ensure that the owner does not know the distributed shares, which is counter-intuitive and not addressed by known techniques. We investigate various attack scenarios, and propose a secure and efficient protocol based on a combination of cryptographic primitives. Our technique could be of independent interest to other applications of threshold secret sharing in deterring sharing
ETHTID: Deployable Threshold Information Disclosure on Ethereum
We address the Threshold Information Disclosure (TID) problem on Ethereum: An
arbitrary number of users commit to the scheduled disclosure of their
individual messages recorded on the Ethereum blockchain if and only if all such
messages are disclosed. Before a disclosure, only the original sender of each
message should know its contents. To accomplish this, we task a small council
with executing a distributed generation and threshold sharing of an asymmetric
key pair. The public key can be used to encrypt messages which only become
readable once the threshold-shared decryption key is reconstructed at a
predefined point in time and recorded on-chain. With blockchains like Ethereum,
it is possible to coordinate such procedures and attach economic stakes to the
actions of participating individuals. In this paper, we present ETHTID, an
Ethereum smart contract application to coordinate Threshold Information
Disclosure. We base our implementation on ETHDKG [1], a smart contract
application for distributed key generation and threshold sharing, and adapt it
to fit our differing use case as well as add functionality to oversee a
scheduled reconstruction of the decryption key. For our main cost saving
optimisation, we show that the security of the underlying cryptographic scheme
is maintained. We evaluate how the execution costs depend on the size of the
council and the threshold and show that the presented protocol is deployable on
Ethereum with a council of more than 200 members with gas savings of 20-40%
compared to ETHDKG
Atomic Information Disclosure of Off-Chained Computations Using Threshold Encryption
Public Blockchains on their own are, by definition, incapable of keeping data private and disclosing it at a later time. Control over the eventual disclosure of private data must be maintained outside a Blockchain by withholding and later publishing encryption keys, for example. We propose the Atomic Information Disclosure (AID) pattern based on threshold encryption that allows a set of key holders to govern the release of data without having access to it. We motivate this pattern with problems that require independently reproduced solutions. By keeping submissions private until a deadline expires, participants are unable to plagiarise and must therefore generate their own solutions which can then be aggregated and analysed to determine a final answer. We outline the importance of a game-theoretically sound incentive scheme, possible attacks, and other future work
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
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