Related papers: Prospective Hybrid Consensus for Project PAI
A blockchain and smart contract enabled security mechanism for IoT applications has been reported recently for urban, financial, and network services. However, due to the power-intensive and a low-throughput consensus mechanism in existing…
Proof of Stake (PoS) is a burgeoning Sybil resistance mechanism that aims to have a digital asset ("token") serve as security collateral in crypto networks. However, PoS has so far eluded a comprehensive threat model that encompasses both…
Large proof of work (PoW) networks allow anyone to earn rewards by running computation-intensive hash puzzles for profit, yet they typically consume electricity comparable to that of medium-sized countries. Repurposing computing resources…
We propose a refinement to the well known, and widely used, proof-of-work scheme of zeroing a cryptographic hash. Our refinement allows multiple autonomous users to cooperate on the proof-of-work for their own transactions in order to bring…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains have emerged as a robust and effective consensus mechanism in open environments, leading to widespread deployment with numerous cryptocurrency platforms and substantial investments. However, the commonly…
Proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrencies rely on a balance of security and fairness in order to maintain a sustainable ecosystem of miners and users. Users demand fast and consistent transaction confirmation, and in exchange drive the adoption…
Current blockchain protocols (e.g., Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake) secure the ledger yet cannot measure validator trustworthiness, allowing subtle misconduct that is especially damaging in decentralized-finance (DeFi) settings. We…
As cryptographic tokens and altcoins are increasingly being built to serve as utility tokens, the notion of useful work consensus protocols, as opposed to number-crunching PoW consensus, is becoming ever more important. In such contexts,…
Designing an efficient difficulty control algorithm is an essential problem in Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchains because the network hash rate is randomly changing. This paper proposes a general difficulty control algorithm and provides…
We introduce Unity Interleave, a new consensus algorithm for public blockchain settings. It is an eventual consistency protocol merging the Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) into a coherent stochastic process. It builds upon…
Proof of work blockchain protocols using multiple hash types are considered. It is proven that the security region of such a protocol cannot be the AND of a 51\% attack on all the hash types. Nevertheless, a protocol called Merged Bitcoin…
This article presents the first-ever blockchain which can simultaneously handle device and data security, which is important for the emerging Internet-of-Everything (IoE). This article presents a unique concept of blockchain that integrates…
For Nakamoto's longest-chain consensus protocol, whose proof-of-work (PoW) and proof-of-stake (PoS) variants power major blockchains such as Bitcoin and Cardano, we revisit the classic problem of the security-performance tradeoff: Given a…
Cryptocurrencies that are based on Proof-of-Work (PoW) often rely on special purpose hardware to perform so-called mining operations that secure the system, with miners receiving freshly minted tokens as a reward for their work. A notable…
Proof of Work (PoW) has extensively served as the foundation of blockchain's security, consistency, and tamper-resistance. However, long has it been criticized for its tremendous and inefficient utilization of computational power and…
Popular distributed ledger technology (DLT) systems using proof-of-work (PoW) for Sybil attack resistance have extreme energy requirements, drawing stern criticism from academia, businesses, and the media. DLT systems building on…
The distributed consensus mechanism is the backbone of the rapidly developing blockchain network. Blockchain platforms consume vast amounts of electricity based on the current consensus mechanism of Proof of Work. Here, we point out an…
Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchains offer promising alternatives to traditional Proof of Work (PoW) systems, providing scalability and energy efficiency. However, blockchains operate in a decentralized manner and the network is composed of…
Proof of Work (PoW) based cyberdefense systems require incoming network requests to expend effort solving an arbitrary mathematical puzzle. Current state of the art is unable to differentiate between trustworthy and untrustworthy…
We present two attacks targeting the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum consensus protocol. The first attack suggests a fundamental conceptual incompatibility between PoS and the Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree (GHOST) fork choice paradigm…