4,997 research outputs found
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
Audit report on the City of Exira, Iowa for the year ended June 30, 2007
Audit report on the City of Exira, Iowa for the year ended June 30, 200
City of Nevada, Independent Auditor's Reports, Basic Financial Statements and Supplemental Information, Schedule of Findings, June 30, 2004
City Audit Repor
Born and Raised Distributively: Fully Distributed Non-Interactive Adaptively-Secure Threshold Signatures with Short Shares
International audienceThreshold cryptography is a fundamental distributed computational paradigm for enhancing the availability and the security of cryptographic public-key schemes. It does it by dividing private keys into shares handed out to distinct servers. In threshold signature schemes, a set of at least servers is needed to produce a valid digital signature. Availability is assured by the fact that any subset of servers can produce a signature when authorized. At the same time, the scheme should remain robust (in the fault tolerance sense) and unforgeable (cryptographically) against up to corrupted servers; {\it i.e.}, it adds quorum control to traditional cryptographic services and introduces redundancy. Originally, most practical threshold signatures have a number of demerits: They have been analyzed in a static corruption model (where the set of corrupted servers is fixed at the very beginning of the attack), they require interaction, they assume a trusted dealer in the key generation phase (so that the system is not fully distributed), or they suffer from certain overheads in terms of storage (large share sizes). In this paper, we construct practical {\it fully distributed} (the private key is born distributed), non-interactive schemes -- where the servers can compute their partial signatures without communication with other servers -- with adaptive security ({\it i.e.}, the adversary corrupts servers dynamically based on its full view of the history of the system). Our schemes are very efficient in terms of computation, communication, and scalable storage (with private key shares of size , where certain solutions incur storage costs at each server). Unlike other adaptively secure schemes, our schemes are erasure-free (reliable erasure is a hard to assure and hard to administer property in actual systems). To the best of our knowledge, such a fully distributed highly constrained scheme has been an open problem in the area. In particular, and of special interest, is the fact that Pedersen's traditional distributed key generation (DKG) protocol can be safely employed in the initial key generation phase when the system is born -- although it is well-known not to ensure uniformly distributed public keys. An advantage of this is that this protocol only takes one round optimistically (in the absence of faulty player)
Multidimensional spectroscopy with entangled light; loop vs ladder delay scanning protocols
Multidimensional optical signals are commonly recorded by varying the delays
between time ordered pulses. These control the evolution of the density matrix
and are described by ladder diagrams. We propose a new non-time-ordered
protocol based on following the time evolution of the wavefunction and
described by loop diagrams. The time variables in this protocol allow to
observe different types of resonances and reveal information about intraband
dephasing not readily available by time ordered techniques. The time variables
involved in this protocol become coupled when using entangled light, which
provides high selectivity and background free measurement of the various
resonances. Entangled light can resolve certain states even when strong
background due to fast dephasing suppresses the resonant features when probed
by classical light
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