Coded Merkle Tree: Solving Data Availability Attacks in Blockchains

In this paper, we propose coded Merkle tree (CMT), a novel hash accumulator that offers a constant-cost protection against data availability attacks in blockchains, even if the majority of the network nodes are malicious. A CMT is constructed using a family of sparse erasure codes on each layer, and is recovered by iteratively applying a peeling-decoding technique that enables a compact proof for data availability attack on any layer. Our algorithm enables any node to verify the full availability of any data block generated by the system by just downloading a $\Theta(1)$ byte block hash commitment and randomly sampling $\Theta(\log b)$ bytes, where $b$ is the size of the data block. With the help of only one connected honest node in the system, our method also allows any node to verify any tampering of the coded Merkle tree by just downloading $\Theta(\log b)$ bytes. We provide a modular library for CMT in Rust and Python and demonstrate its efficacy inside the Parity Bitcoin client.Comment: To appear in Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC) 202

Fault-tolerant aggregation: Flow-Updating meets Mass-Distribution

Flow-Updating (FU) is a fault-tolerant technique that has proved to be efficient in practice for the distributed computation of aggregate functions in communication networks where individual processors do not have access to global information. Previous distributed aggregation protocols, based on repeated sharing of input values (or mass) among processors, sometimes called Mass-Distribution (MD) protocols, are not resilient to communication failures (or message loss) because such failures yield a loss of mass. In this paper, we present a protocol which we call Mass-Distribution with Flow-Updating (MDFU). We obtain MDFU by applying FU techniques to classic MD. We analyze the convergence time of MDFU showing that stochastic message loss produces low overhead. This is the first convergence proof of an FU-based algorithm. We evaluate MDFU experimentally, comparing it with previous MD and FU protocols, and verifying the behavior predicted by the analysis. Finally, given that MDFU incurs a fixed deviation proportional to the message-loss rate, we adjust the accuracy of MDFU heuristically in a new protocol called MDFU with Linear Prediction (MDFU-LP). The evaluation shows that both MDFU and MDFU-LP behave very well in practice, even under high rates of message loss and even changing the input values dynamically.- A preliminary version of this work appeared in [2]. This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation (CNS-1408782, IIS-1247750); the National Institutes of Health (CA198952-01); EMC, Inc.; Pace University Seidenberg School of CSIS; and by Project "Coral - Sustainable Ocean Exploitation: Tools and Sensors/NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000036" financed by the North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, and through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

High-Resolution Electron Microscopy of Semiconductor Heterostructures and Nanostructures

This chapter briefly describes the fundamentals of high-resolution electron microscopy techniques. In particular, the Peak Pairs approach for strain mapping with atomic column resolution, and a quantitative procedure to extract atomic column compositional information from Z-contrast high-resolution images are presented. It also reviews the structural, compositional, and strain results obtained by conventional and advanced transmission electron microscopy methods on a number of III–V semiconductor nanostructures and heterostructures

Auditing for Distributed Storage Systems

Distributed storage codes have recently received a lot of attention in the community. Independently, another body of work has proposed integrity-checking schemes for cloud storage, none of which, however, is customized for coding-based storage or can efficiently support repair. In this work, we bridge the gap between these two currently disconnected bodies of work. We propose NC-Audit, a novel cryptography-based remote data integrity-checking scheme, designed specifically for network-coding-based distributed storage systems. NC-Audit combines, for the first time, the following desired properties: 1) efficient checking of data integrity; 2) efficient support for repairing failed nodes; and 3) protection against information leakage when checking is performed by a third party. The key ingredient of the design of NC-Audit is a novel combination of SpaceMac, a homomorphic message authentication code (MAC) scheme for network coding, and NCrypt, a novel chosen-plaintext attack (CPA) secure encryption scheme that preserves the correctness of SpaceMac. Our evaluation of NC-Audit based on a real Java implementation shows that the proposed scheme has significantly lower overhead compared to the state-of-the-art schemes for both auditing and repairing of failed nodes

Index Coding with Coded Side-Information

This letter investigates a new class of index coding problems. One sender broadcasts packets to multiple users, each desiring a subset, by exploiting prior knowledge of linear combinations of packets. We refer to this class of problems as index coding with coded side-information. Our aim is to characterize the minimum index code length that the sender needs to transmit to simultaneously satisfy all user requests. We show that the optimal binary vector index code length is equal to the minimum rank (minrank) of a matrix whose elements consist of the sets of desired packet indices and side-information encoding matrices. This is the natural extension of matrix minrank in the presence of coded side information. Using the derived expression, we propose a greedy randomized algorithm to minimize the rank of the derived matrix.111210sciescopu

Adaptive bandwidth-efficient recovery techniques in erasure-coded cloud storage

In order to handle the dramatic growth of digital data, cloud storage systems demand novel techniques to improve data reliability. Replication and erasure codes are the most important data reliability techniques employed in cloud storage systems, but individually they have their own challenges. In this paper, we propose a hybrid technique employing proactive replication of data blocks in erasure-coded storage systems. The technique employs a set of erasure coding-agnostic bandwidth-efficient data recovery techniques that reduce the bandwidth used for recovery without compromising data reliability. Experiments show that our approach improves repair bandwidth efficiency and reduces network traffic in cloud storage systems with limited storage overhead compared to available recovery approaches