Aggregatable Distributed Key Generation

In this paper, we introduce a distributed key generation (DKG) protocol with aggregatable and publicly-verifiable transcripts. Compared with prior publicly-verifiable approaches, our DKG reduces the size of the final transcript and the time to verify it from O(n2) to O(nlogn) , where n denotes the number of parties. As compared with prior non-publicly-verifiable approaches, our DKG leverages gossip rather than all-to-all communication to reduce verification and communication complexity. We also revisit existing DKG security definitions, which are quite strong, and propose new and natural relaxations. As a result, we can prove the security of our aggregatable DKG as well as that of several existing DKGs, including the popular Pedersen variant. We show that, under these new definitions, these existing DKGs can be used to yield secure threshold variants of popular cryptosystems such as El-Gamal encryption and BLS signatures. We also prove that our DKG can be securely combined with a new efficient verifiable unpredictable function (VUF), whose security we prove in the random oracle model. Finally, we experimentally evaluate our DKG and show that the per-party overheads scale linearly and are practical. For 64 parties, it takes 71 ms to share and 359 ms to verify the overall transcript, while for 8192 parties, it takes 8 s and 42.2 s respectively

Plumo: An Ultralight Blockchain Client

Syncing the latest state of a blockchain can be a resource-intensive task, driving (especially mobile) end users towards centralized services offering instant access. To expand full decentralized access to anyone with a mobile phone, we introduce a consensus-agnostic compiler for constructing ultralight clients, providing secure and highly efficient blockchain syncing via a sequence of SNARK-based state transition proofs, and prove its security formally. Instantiating this, we present Plumo, an ultralight client for the Celo blockchain capable of syncing the latest network state summary in just a few seconds even on a low-end mobile phone. In Plumo, each transition proof covers four months of blockchain history and can be produced for just $25 USD of compute. Plumo achieves this level of efficiency thanks to two new SNARK-friendly constructions, which may also be of independent interest: a new BLS-based offline aggregate multisignature scheme in which signers do not have to know the members of their multisignature group in advance, and a new composite algebraic-symmetric cryptographic hash function

Hydrogen gas sensing using aluminum doped ZnO metasurface

Hydrogen sensing is crucial in a wide variety of areas, such as industrial, environmental, energy and biomedical applications. However, engineering a practical, reliable, fast, sensitive and cost-effective hydrogen sensor, is a persistent challenge. Here we demonstrate hydrogen sensing using aluminum-doped zinc oxide (AZO) metasurfaces based on optical read-out. The proposed sensing system consists of highly ordered AZO nanotubes (hollow pillars) standing on a SiO2 layer deposited on a Si wafer. Upon exposure to hydrogen gas, the AZO nanotube system shows a wavelength shift in the minimum reflectance by 13 nm within 10 minutes for a hydrogen concentration of 4%. These AZO nanotubes can also sense the presence of a low concentration (0.7 %) of hydrogen gas within 10 minutes. Its rapid response time even for low concentration, the possibility of large sensing area fabrication with good precision, and high sensitivity at room temperature make these highly ordered nanotube structures a promising miniaturized H2 gas sensor.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure

Abelian Chern-Simons Vortices and Holomorphic Burgers' Hierarchy

The Abelian Chern-Simons Gauge Field Theory in 2+1 dimensions and its relation with holomorphic Burgers' Hierarchy is considered. It is shown that the relation between complex potential and the complex gauge field as in incompressible and irrotational hydrodynamics, has meaning of the analytic Cole-Hopf transformation, linearizing the Burgers Hierarchy in terms of the holomorphic Schr\"odinger Hierarchy. Then the motion of planar vortices in Chern-Simons theory, appearing as pole singularities of the gauge field, corresponds to motion of zeroes of the hierarchy. Using boost transformations of the complex Galilean group of the hierarchy, a rich set of exact solutions, describing integrable dynamics of planar vortices and vortex lattices in terms of the generalized Kampe de Feriet and Hermite polynomials is constructed. The results are applied to the holomorphic reduction of the Ishimori model and the corresponding hierarchy, describing dynamics of magnetic vortices and corresponding lattices in terms of complexified Calogero-Moser models. Corrections on two vortex dynamics from the Moyal space-time non-commutativity in terms of Airy functions are found.Comment: 15 pages, talk presented in Workshop `Nonlinear Physics IV: Theory and Experiment`, 22-30 June 2006, Gallipoli, Ital

The Vela Pulsar and its Synchrotron Nebula

(Abridged) We present high-resolution Chandra X-ray observations of PSR B0833-45, the 89 ms pulsar associated with the Vela supernova remnant. We have acquired two observations separated by one month to search for changes in the pulsar and its environment following an extreme glitch in its rotation frequency. We find a well-resolved nebula with a toroidal morphology remarkably similar to that observed in the Crab Nebula, along with an axial Crab-like jet. Between the two observations the flux from the pulsar is found to be steady to within 0.75%; the 3 sigma limit on the fractional increase in the pulsar's X-ray flux is < ~10^-5 of the inferred glitch energy. We use this limit to constrain parameters of glitch models and neutron star structure. We do find a significant increase in the flux of the nebula's outer arc; if associated with the glitch, the inferred propagation velocity is > 0.7c, similar to that seen in the brightening of the Crab Nebula wisps. We propose an explanation for the X-ray structure of the Vela synchrotron nebula based on a model originally developed for the Crab Nebula. In a departure from the Crab model, the magnetization parameter "sigma" of the Vela pulsar wind is allowed to be of order unity; this is consistent with the simplest MHD transport of magnetic field from the pulsar to the nebula, where B < 4 X 10^-4 G. We review effects that may enhance the probability of alignment between the spin axis and space velocity of a pulsar, and speculate that short-period, slowly moving pulsars are just the ones best-suited to producing synchrotron nebulae with such aligned structures.Comment: 16 pages with 8 figures, uses LaTex, emulateapj.sty. Refereed version. To appear in The Astrophysical Journa

The entanglement in one-dimensional random XY spin chain with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction

The impurities of exchange couplings, external magnetic fields and Dzyaloshinskii--Moriya (DM) interaction considered as Gaussian distribution, the entanglement in one-dimensional random $XY$ spin systems is investigated by the method of solving the different spin-spin correlation functions and the average magnetization per spin. The entanglement dynamics at central locations of ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic chains have been studied by varying the three impurities and the strength of DM interaction. (i) For ferromagnetic spin chain, the weak DM interaction can improve the amount of entanglement to a large value, and the impurities have the opposite effect on the entanglement below and above critical DM interaction. (ii) For antiferromagnetic spin chain, DM interaction can enhance the entanglement to a steady value. Our results imply that DM interaction strength, the impurity and exchange couplings (or magnetic field) play competing roles in enhancing quantum entanglement.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure