Related papers: Specification of the Giskard Consensus Protocol
As blockchains continue to seek to scale to a larger number of nodes, the communication complexity of protocols has become a significant priority as the network can quickly become overburdened. Several schemes have attempted to address…
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…
Consensus protocols are crucial for a blockchain system as they are what allow agreement between the system's nodes in a potentially adversarial environment. For this reason, it is paramount to ensure their correct design and implementation…
We consider the problem of reaching consensus in communication networks that are modeled by directed graphs. We assume the existence of a message authentication mechanism (such as digital signatures) to verify the integrity of messages. We…
The purpose of a consensus protocol is to keep a distributed network of nodes "in sync," even in the presence of an unpredictable communication network and adversarial behavior by some of the participating nodes. In the permissionless…
The Bitcoin system only provides eventual consistency. For everyday life, the time to confirm a Bitcoin transaction is prohibitively slow. In this paper we propose a new system, built on the Bitcoin blockchain, which enables strong…
Blockchain technology enables stakeholders to conduct trusted data sharing and exchange without a trusted centralized institution. These features make blockchain applications attractive to enhance trustworthiness in very different contexts.…
Aiming for strong security assurance, recently there has been an increasing interest in formal verification of cryptographic constructions. This paper presents a mechanised formal verification of the popular Pedersen commitment protocol,…
One of the most recent members of the Paxos family of protocols is Generalized Paxos. This variant of Paxos has the characteristic that it departs from the original specification of consensus, allowing for a weaker safety condition where…
During Financial Cryptography 2012 Chan et al. presented a novel privacy-protection fault-tolerant data aggregation protocol. Comparing to previous work, their scheme guaranteed provable privacy of individuals and could work even if some…
A smart contract is a computer program which allows users to automate their actions on the blockchain platform. Given the significance of smart contracts in supporting important activities across industry sectors including supply chain,…
The proof-of-work consensus protocol suffers from two main limitations: waste of energy and offering only probabilistic guarantees about the status of the blockchain. This paper introduces SklCoin, a new Byzantine consensus protocol and its…
The Payment Protocol standard BIP70, specifying how payments in Bitcoin are performed by merchants and customers, is supported by the largest payment processors and most widely-used wallets. The protocol has been shown to be vulnerable to…
We introduce Unity, a new consensus algorithm for public blockchain settings. Unity is an eventual consistency protocol merging the Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) into a coherent stochastic process. It encompasses hardware and…
Blockchain technology and related frameworks have recently received extensive attention. Blockchain systems use multi-party consensus protocols to reach agreements on transactions. Hyperledger Fabric framework exposes a multi-party…
Security protocols often use randomization to achieve probabilistic non-determinism. This non-determinism, in turn, is used in obfuscating the dependence of observable values on secret data. Since the correctness of security protocols is…
The goal of this paper is to propose a blockchain-based platform to enhance transparency and traceability of cybersecurity certification information motivated by the recently adopted EU Cybersecurity Act. The proposed platform is generic…
We present "Gasper," a proof-of-stake-based consensus protocol, which is an idealized version of the proposed Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain. The protocol combines Casper FFG, a finality tool, with LMD GHOST, a fork-choice rule. We prove safety,…
Cryptographic Protocols (CP) are distributed algorithms intended for secure communication in an insecure environment. They are used, for example, in electronic payments, electronic voting procedures, systems of confidential data processing,…
While the large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) makes many new applications feasible, like Smart Cities, IoT also brings new concerns on data reliability, security, and privacy. The rapid evolution in blockchain technologies, which relied on…