549 research outputs found
Privacy-Enhancing First-Price Auctions Using Rational Cryptography
We consider enhancing a sealed-bid single-item auction with
\emph{privacy} concerns, our assumption being that bidders primarily
care about monetary payoff and secondarily worry about exposing
information about their type to other players and learning information
about other players\u27 types. To treat privacy explicitly within the
game theoretic context, we put forward a novel \emph{hybrid utility}
model that considers both fiscal and privacy components in the
players\u27 payoffs.
We show how to use rational cryptography to approximately implement a
given \emph{ex interim} individually strictly rational equilibrium of
such an auction (or any game with a winner) without a trusted mediator
through a cryptographic protocol that uses only point-to-point
authenticated channels between the players. By ``ex interim
individually strictly rational\u27\u27 we mean that, given its type and
before making its move, each player has a strictly positive expected
utility, i.e., it becomes the winner of the auction with positive
probability. By ``approximately implement\u27\u27 we mean that, under
cryptographic assumptions, running the protocol is a computational
Nash equilibrium with a payoff profile negligibly close to the
original equilibrium.
In addition the protocol has the stronger property that no collusion,
of any size, can obtain more by deviating in the implementation than
by deviating in the ideal mediated setting which the mechanism was
designed in. Also, despite the non-symmetric payoffs profile, the
protocol always correctly terminates
Cooperative AI via Decentralized Commitment Devices
Credible commitment devices have been a popular approach for robust
multi-agent coordination. However, existing commitment mechanisms face
limitations like privacy, integrity, and susceptibility to mediator or user
strategic behavior. It is unclear if the cooperative AI techniques we study are
robust to real-world incentives and attack vectors. However, decentralized
commitment devices that utilize cryptography have been deployed in the wild,
and numerous studies have shown their ability to coordinate algorithmic agents
facing adversarial opponents with significant economic incentives, currently in
the order of several million to billions of dollars. In this paper, we use
examples in the decentralization and, in particular, Maximal Extractable Value
(MEV) (arXiv:1904.05234) literature to illustrate the potential security issues
in cooperative AI. We call for expanded research into decentralized commitments
to advance cooperative AI capabilities for secure coordination in open
environments and empirical testing frameworks to evaluate multi-agent
coordination ability given real-world commitment constraints.Comment: NeurIPS 2023- Multi-Agent Security Worksho
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Computational Challenges in E-Commerce
Economic and social sciences will drive Internet protocols and services into the future.Engineering and Applied Science
Still Wrong Use of Pairings in Cryptography
Several pairing-based cryptographic protocols are recently proposed with a
wide variety of new novel applications including the ones in emerging
technologies like cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), e-health systems
and wearable technologies. There have been however a wide range of incorrect
use of these primitives. The paper of Galbraith, Paterson, and Smart (2006)
pointed out most of the issues related to the incorrect use of pairing-based
cryptography. However, we noticed that some recently proposed applications
still do not use these primitives correctly. This leads to unrealizable,
insecure or too inefficient designs of pairing-based protocols. We observed
that one reason is not being aware of the recent advancements on solving the
discrete logarithm problems in some groups. The main purpose of this article is
to give an understandable, informative, and the most up-to-date criteria for
the correct use of pairing-based cryptography. We thereby deliberately avoid
most of the technical details and rather give special emphasis on the
importance of the correct use of bilinear maps by realizing secure
cryptographic protocols. We list a collection of some recent papers having
wrong security assumptions or realizability/efficiency issues. Finally, we give
a compact and an up-to-date recipe of the correct use of pairings.Comment: 25 page
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