Angļu-latviešu statistiskās mašīntulkošanas sistēmas izveide: metodes, resursi un pirmie rezultāti

<p class="Pa4"><strong>DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH-LATVIAN STATISTICAL MACHINE TRANSLATION SYSTEM: METHODS, RESOURCES AND FIRST RESULTS</strong></p><p class="Pa5"><em>Summary</em></p><p>This paper presents research and development of English-Latvian Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) prototypes for legal domain. Several methods have been investigated, i.e., phrase-based models and factored models. Translation quality has been evaluated using automated metrics (BLEU score) and human evaluation. In automatic evaluation the best score (46.44 BLEU points) was assigned to factored model trained on JRC Ac­quis corpus (version 3.0) which was also evaluated as the best from the human viewpoint. In addition, error analysis of SMT output was performed. This analysis showed that al­though the output of the best prototype demonstrated a reasonable quality, it had several frequent common errors, i.e., incorrect form, missing words and wrong word order. For the future, work on tree-based SMT and hybrid systems is proposed.</p

zkLedger: Privacy-Preserving Auditing for Distributed Ledgers

Distributed ledgers (e.g. blockchains) enable financial institutions to efficiently reconcile cross-organization transactions. For example, banks might use a distributed ledger as a settlement log for digital assets. Unfortunately, these ledgers are either entirely public to all participants, revealing sensitive strategy and trading information, or are private but do not support third-party auditing without revealing the contents of transactions to the auditor. Auditing and financial oversight are critical to proving institutions are complying with regulation. This paper presents zkLedger, the first system to protect ledger participants\u27 privacy and provide fast, provably correct auditing. Banks create digital asset transactions that are visible only to the organizations party to the transaction, but are publicly verifiable. An auditor sends queries to banks, for example What is the outstanding amount of a certain digital asset on your balance sheet? and gets a response and cryptographic assurance that the response is correct. zkLedger has two important benefits over previous work. First, zkLedger provides fast, rich auditing with a new proof scheme using Schnorr-type non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs. Unlike zkSNARKs, our techniques do not require trusted setup and only rely on widely-used cryptographic assumptions. Second, zkLedger provides *completeness*; it uses a columnar ledger construction so that banks cannot hide transactions from the auditor, and participants can use rolling caches to produce and verify answers quickly. We implement a distributed version of zkLedger that can produce provably-correct answers to auditor queries on a ledger with a hundred thousand transactions in less than 10 milliseconds

Scalable Zero Knowledge via Cycles of Elliptic Curves

Non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge for general NP statements are a powerful cryptographic primitive, both in theory and in practical applications. Recently, much research has focused on achieving an additional property, succinctness, requiring the proof to be very short and easy to verify. Such proof systems are known as zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (zk-SNARKs), and are desired when communication is expensive, or the verifier is computationally weak. Existing zk-SNARK implementations have severe scalability limitations, in terms of space complexity as a function of the size of the computation being proved (e.g., running time of the NP statement’s decision program). First, the size of the proving key is quasilinear in the upper bound on the computation size. Second, producing a proof requires writing down all intermediate values of the entire computation, and then conducting global operations such as FFTs. The bootstrapping technique of Bitansky et al. (STOC ’13), following Valiant (TCC ’08), offers an approach to scalability, by recursively composing proofs: proving statements about acceptance of the proof system’s own verifier (and correctness of the program’s latest step). Alas, recursive composition of known zk-SNARKs has never been realized in practice, due to enormous computational cost. Using new elliptic-curve cryptographic techniques, and methods for exploiting the proof systems’ field structure and nondeterminism, we achieve the first zk-SNARK implementation that practically achieves recursive proof composition. Our zk-SNARK implementation runs random-access machine programs and produces proofs of their correct execution, on today’s hardware, for any program running time. It takes constant time to generate the keys that support all computation sizes. Subsequently, the proving process only incurs a constant multiplicative overhead compared to the original computation’s time, and an essentially-constant additive overhead in memory. Thus, our zk-SNARK implementation is the first to have a well-defined, albeit low, clock rate of verified instructions per second

Succinct Non-Interactive Zero Knowledge for a von Neumann Architecture

We build a system that provides succinct non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) for program executions on a von Neumann RISC architecture. The system has two components: a cryptographic proof system for verifying satisfiability of arithmetic circuits, and a circuit generator to translate program executions to such circuits. Our design of both components improves in functionality and efficiency over prior work, as follows. Our circuit generator is the first to be universal: it does not need to know the program, but only a bound on its running time. Moreover, the size of the output circuit depends additively (rather than multiplicatively) on program size, allowing verification of larger programs. The cryptographic proof system improves proving and verification times, by leveraging new algorithms and a pairing library tailored to the protocol. We evaluated our system for programs with up to 10,000 instructions, running for up to 32,000 machine steps, each of which can arbitrarily access random-access memory; and also demonstrated it executing programs that use just-in-time compilation. Our proofs are 230 bytes long at 80 bits of security, or 288 bytes long at 128 bits of security. Typical verification time is 5 milliseconds, regardless of the original program\u27s running time

Quasi-Linear Size Zero Knowledge from Linear-Algebraic PCPs

The seminal result that every language having an interactive proof also has a zero-knowledge interactive proof assumes the existence of one-way functions. Ostrovsky and Wigderson (ISTCS 1993) proved that this assumption is necessary: if one-way functions do not exist, then only languages in BPP have zero-knowledge interactive proofs. Ben-Or et al. (STOC 1988) proved that, nevertheless, every language having a multi-prover interactive proof also has a zero-knowledge multi-prover interactive proof, unconditionally. Their work led to, among many other things, a line of work studying zero knowledge without intractability assumptions. In this line of work, Kilian, Petrank, and Tardos (STOC 1997) defined and constructed zero-knowledge probabilistically checkable proofs (PCPs). While PCPs with quasilinear-size proof length, but without zero knowledge, are known, no such result is known for zero knowledge PCPs. In this work, we show how to construct ``2-round\u27\u27 PCPs that are zero knowledge and of length \tilde{O}(K) where K is the number of queries made by a malicious polynomial time verifier. Previous solutions required PCPs of length at least K^6 to maintain zero knowledge. In this model, which we call *duplex PCP* (DPCP), the verifier first receives an oracle string from the prover, then replies with a message, and then receives another oracle string from the prover; a malicious verifier can make up to K queries in total to both oracles. Deviating from previous works, our constructions do not invoke the PCP Theorem as a blackbox but instead rely on certain algebraic properties of a specific family of PCPs. We show that if the PCP has a certain linear algebraic structure --- which many central constructions can be shown to possess, including [BFLS91,ALMSS98,BS08] --- we can add the zero knowledge property at virtually no cost (up to additive lower order terms) while introducing only minor modifications in the algorithms of the prover and verifier. We believe that our linear-algebraic characterization of PCPs may be of independent interest, as it gives a simplified way to view previous well-studied PCP constructions

A High Performance Payment Processing System Designed for Central Bank Digital Currencies

In light of continued innovation in money and payments, many central banks are exploring the creation of a central bank digital currency (CBDC), a new form of central bank money which supplements existing central bank reserve account balances and physical currency. This paper presents Hamilton, a flexible transaction processor design that supports a range of models for a CBDC and minimizes data storage in the core transaction processor by storing unspent funds as opaque hashes. Hamilton supports users custodying their own funds or custody provided by financial intermediaries. We describe and evaluate two implementations: the atomizer architecture which provides a globally ordered history of transactions but is limited in throughput (170,000 transactions per second), and the 2PC architecture that scales peak throughput almost linearly with resources (up to a measured throughput of 1.7M transactions per second) but does not provide a globally ordered list of transactions. We released our two architectures under the MIT open source license at https://github.com/mit-dci/opencbdc-tx

Computational integrity with a public random string from quasi-linear PCPs

A party running a computation remotely may benefit from misreporting its output, say, to lower its tax. Cryptographic protocols that detect and prevent such falsities hold the promise to enhance the security of decentralized systems with stringent computational integrity requirements, like Bitcoin [Nak09]. To gain public trust it is imperative to use publicly verifiable protocols that have no “backdoors” and which can be set up using only a short public random string. Probabilistically Checkable Proof (PCP) systems [BFL90, BFLS91, AS98, ALM + 98] can be used to construct astonishingly efficient protocols [Kil92, Mic00] of this nature but some of the main components of such systems — proof composition [AS98] and low-degree testing via PCPs of Proximity (PCPPs) [BGH + 05, DR06] — have been considered efficient only asymptotically, for unrealistically large computations; recent cryptographic alternatives [PGHR13, BCG + 13a] suffer from a non-public setup phase. This work introduces SCI, the first implementation of a scalable PCP system (that uses both PCPPs and proof composition). We used SCI to prove correctness of executions of up to $2^{20}$ cycles of a simple processor (Figure 1) and calculated (Figure 2) its break-even point [SVP + 12, SMBW12]. The significance of our findings is two-fold: (i) it marks the transition of core PCP techniques (like proof composition and PCPs of Proximity) from mathematical theory to practical system engineering, and (ii) the thresholds obtained are nearly achievable and hence show that PCP-supported computational integrity is closer to reality than previously assumed