Related papers: Proof of Work Without All the Work: Computationall…

Mining is a central operation of all proof-of-work (PoW) based cryptocurrencies. The vast majority of miners today participate in "mining pools" instead of "solo mining" in order to lower risk and achieve a more steady income. However, this…

Cybersecurity software tool evaluation is difficult due to the inherently adversarial nature of the field. A penetration testing (or offensive) tool must be tested against a viable defensive adversary and a defensive tool must, similarly,…

All public blockchains are secured by a proof of opportunity cost among block producers. For example, the security offered by proof-of-work (PoW) systems, like Bitcoin, is due to spent computation; it is work precisely because it cannot be…

We propose a methodology for verifying security properties of network protocols at design level. It can be separated in two main parts: context and requirements analysis and informal verification; and formal representation and procedural…

As smart contract platforms autonomously manage billions of dollars of capital, quantifying the portfolio risk that investors engender in these systems is increasingly important. Recent work illustrates that Proof of Stake (PoS) is…

Proof-of-Stake blockchains based on a longest-chain consensus protocol are an attractive energy-friendly alternative to the Proof-of-Work paradigm. However, formal barriers to "getting the incentives right" were recently discovered, driven…

Data poisoning attacks spoof a recommender system to make arbitrary, attacker-desired recommendations via injecting fake users with carefully crafted rating scores into the recommender system. We envision a cat-and-mouse game for such data…

In most PUF-based authentication schemes, a central server is usually engaged to verify the response of the device's PUF to challenge bit-streams. However, the server availability may be intermittent in practice. To tackle such an issue,…

A proof of quantumness is a method for provably demonstrating (to a classical verifier) that a quantum device can perform computational tasks that a classical device with comparable resources cannot. Providing a proof of quantumness is the…

Network protocols are programs with inputs and outputs that follow predefined communication patterns to synchronize and exchange information. There are many protocols and each serves a different purpose, e.g., routing, transport, secure…

Proofs of Retrievability (PoRs) are protocols which allow a client to store data remotely and to efficiently ensure, via audits, that the entirety of that data is still intact. A dynamic PoR system also supports efficient retrieval and…

The problem in which one of three pairwise interacting parties is required to securely compute a function of the inputs held by the other two, when one party may arbitrarily deviate from the computation protocol (active behavioral model),…

Embedded devices are increasingly ubiquitous and their importance is hard to overestimate. While they often support safety-critical functions (e.g., in medical devices and sensor-alarm combinations), they are usually implemented under…

In this paper, we introduce a formal notion of partial compliance, called Attack-resistance, of a computer program running together with a defense mechanism w.r.t a non-exploitability specification. In our setting, a program may contain…

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) is a general cryptographic technique that allows distrusting parties to compute a function of their individual inputs, while only revealing the output of the function. It has found applications in areas…

Advances in technology have enabled tremendous progress in the development of a highly connected ecosystem of ubiquitous computing devices collectively called the Internet of Things (IoT). Ensuring the security of IoT devices is a high…

Proof-of-Attendance (PoA) mechanisms are typically employed to demonstrate a specific user's participation in an event, whether virtual or in-person. The goal of this study is to extend such mechanisms to broader contexts where the user…

In distributed applications, Brewer's CAP theorem tells us that when networks become partitioned, there is a tradeoff between consistency and availability. Consistency is agreement on the values of shared variables across a system, and…

This is a study of the security of the Coherent One-Way (COW) protocol for quantum cryptography, proposed recently as a simple and fast experimental scheme. In the zero-error regime, the eavesdropper Eve can only take advantage of the…

Due to the increasing interest in blockchain technology for fostering secure, auditable, decentralized applications, a set of challenges associated with this technology need to be addressed. In this letter, we focus on the delay associated…