760 research outputs found
Speed-Security Tradeoffs in Blockchain Protocols
Transaction processing speed is one of the major considerations
in cryptocurrencies that are based on proof of work (POW) such as Bitcoin. At an intuitive level it is widely understood that processing speed is at odds with the security aspects of the underlying POW based consensus mechanism of such protocols, nevertheless the tradeoff between the two properties is still not well understood.
In this work, motivated by recent work \cite{GKL15}
in the formal analysis of the Bitcoin backbone protocol,
we investigate the tradeoff between provable security and transaction processing speed viewing the latter as a function of the block generation rate.
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We introduce a new formal property of blockchain protocols,
called {\em chain growth}, and we show it is fundamental
for arguing the security of a robust transaction ledger.
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We strengthen the results of \cite{GKL15} in the following ways:
we show how the properties of persistence and liveness of the ledger reduce in a black-box
fashion in the underlying properties of the backbone protocol, namely common prefix, chain quality and chain growth, and we improve the security bounds showing that the robustness of the ledger holds for even the faster (than Bitcoin\u27s) block
generation rates which have been adopted by other ``alt-coins.\u27\u27
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We also present a theoretical attack against bitcoin which we validate in simulation that works when blockchain rate is highly accelerated.
This presents a natural upper bound in the context of the speed-security tradeoff.
By combining our positive and negative results we map the speed/security domain for blockchain protocols and list open problems for future work
An assessment of blockchain consensus protocols for the Internet of Things
In a few short years the Internet of Things has become an intrinsic part of everyday life, with connected devices included in products created for homes, cars and even medical equipment. But its rapid growth has created several security problems, with respect to the transmission and storage of vast amounts of customers data, across an insecure heterogeneous collection of networks. The Internet of Things is therefore creating a unique set of risk and problems that will affect most households. From breaches in confidentiality, which could allow users to be snooped on, through to failures in integrity, which could lead to consumer data being compromised; devices are presenting many security challenges to which consumers are ill equipped to protect themselves from. Moreover, when this is coupled with the heterogeneous nature of the industry, and the interoperable and scalability problems it becomes apparent that the Internet of Things has created an increased attack surface from which security vulnerabilities may be easily exploited. However, it has been conjectured that blockchain may provide a solution to the Internet of Things security and scalability problems. Because of blockchain’s immutability, integrity and scalability, it is possible that its architecture could be used for the storage and transfer of Internet of Things data. Within this paper a cross section of blockchain consensus protocols have been assessed against a requirement framework, to establish each consensus protocols strengths and weaknesses with respect to their potential implementation in an Internet of Things blockchain environment
Overview of Polkadot and its Design Considerations
In this paper we describe the design components of the heterogenous
multi-chain protocol Polkadot and explain how these components help Polkadot
address some of the existing shortcomings of blockchain technologies. At
present, a vast number of blockchain projects have been introduced and employed
with various features that are not necessarily designed to work with each
other. This makes it difficult for users to utilise a large number of
applications on different blockchain projects. Moreover, with the increase in
number of projects the security that each one is providing individually becomes
weaker. Polkadot aims to provide a scalable and interoperable framework for
multiple chains with pooled security that is achieved by the collection of
components described in this paper
Keeping Authorities "Honest or Bust" with Decentralized Witness Cosigning
The secret keys of critical network authorities - such as time, name,
certificate, and software update services - represent high-value targets for
hackers, criminals, and spy agencies wishing to use these keys secretly to
compromise other hosts. To protect authorities and their clients proactively
from undetected exploits and misuse, we introduce CoSi, a scalable witness
cosigning protocol ensuring that every authoritative statement is validated and
publicly logged by a diverse group of witnesses before any client will accept
it. A statement S collectively signed by W witnesses assures clients that S has
been seen, and not immediately found erroneous, by those W observers. Even if S
is compromised in a fashion not readily detectable by the witnesses, CoSi still
guarantees S's exposure to public scrutiny, forcing secrecy-minded attackers to
risk that the compromise will soon be detected by one of the W witnesses.
Because clients can verify collective signatures efficiently without
communication, CoSi protects clients' privacy, and offers the first
transparency mechanism effective against persistent man-in-the-middle attackers
who control a victim's Internet access, the authority's secret key, and several
witnesses' secret keys. CoSi builds on existing cryptographic multisignature
methods, scaling them to support thousands of witnesses via signature
aggregation over efficient communication trees. A working prototype
demonstrates CoSi in the context of timestamping and logging authorities,
enabling groups of over 8,000 distributed witnesses to cosign authoritative
statements in under two seconds.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure
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