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In Proof-of-Work blockchains, difficulty algorithms serve the crucial purpose of maintaining a stable transaction throughput by dynamically adjusting the block difficulty in response to the miners' constantly changing computational power.…
Blockchain protocols come with a variety of security guarantees. For example, BFT-inspired protocols such as Algorand tend to be secure in the partially synchronous setting, while longest chain protocols like Bitcoin will normally require…
Proof of work (PoW), as the representative consensus protocol for blockchain, consumes enormous amounts of computation and energy to determine bookkeeping rights among miners but does not achieve any practical purposes. To address the…
This work proposes a novel proof-of-work blockchain incentive scheme such that, barring exogenous motivations, following the protocol is guaranteed to be the optimal strategy for miners. Our blockchain takes the form of a directed acyclic…
Cryptographic algorithms have been used not only to create robust ciphertexts but also to generate cryptograms that, contrary to the classic goal of cryptography, are meant to be broken. These cryptograms, generally called puzzles, require…
Trusted timestamping is a process for proving that certain information existed at a given point in time. This paper presents a trusted timestamping concept and its implementation in form of a web-based service that uses the decentralized…
Resource-based consensus is the backbone of permissionless distributed ledger systems. The security of such protocols relies fundamentally on the level of resources actively engaged in the system. The variety of different resources (and…
In the age of Big Data, releasing protected sensitive data at a future point in time is critical for various applications. Such self-emerging data release requires the data to be protected until a prescribed data release time and be…
Modern blockchains support a variety of distributed applications beyond cryptocurrencies, including smart contracts -- which let users execute arbitrary code in a distributed and decentralized fashion. Regardless of their intended…
In recent years, blockchain technology has received unparalleled attention from academia, industry, and governments all around the world. It is considered a technological breakthrough anticipated to disrupt several application domains. This…
Permissioned blockchains have been proposed for a variety of use cases that require decentralization yet address enterprise requirements that permissionless blockchains to date cannot satisfy -- particularly in terms of performance.…
Many studies have been done to improve the performance of centrally controlled business processes and enhance the integration between different parties of these collaborations. However, the most serious issues of collaborative business…
We study efficiency in a proof-of-work blockchain with non-zero latencies, focusing in particular on the (inequality in) individual miners' efficiencies. Prior work attributed differences in miners' efficiencies mostly to attacks, but we…
One decade ago, Bitcoin was introduced, becoming the first cryptocurrency and establishing the concept of "blockchain" as a distributed ledger. As of today, there are many different implementations of cryptocurrencies working over a…
Sealed-bid auctions play a crucial role in blockchain ecosystems. Previous works introduced viable blockchain sealed-bid auction protocols, leveraging timed commitments for bid encryption. However, a crucial challenge remains unresolved in…
This paper opts to mitigate the energy-inefficiency of the Blockchain Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm by rationally repurposing the power spent during the mining process. The original PoW mining scheme is designed to consider one…
Time-Lock Puzzles (TLPs) have been developed to securely transmit sensitive information into the future without relying on a trusted third party. Multi-instance TLP is a scalable variant of TLP that enables a server to efficiently find…
In the age of Big Data, enabling task scheduling while protecting users' privacy is critical for various decentralized applications in blockchain-based smart contract platforms. Such a privacy-preserving task scheduler requires the task…
With the rapid growth of hyperconnected devices and decentralized data architectures, safeguarding Internet of Things (IoT) transactions is becoming increasingly challenging. Blockchain presents a promising solution, yet its effectiveness…
Blockchain systems often employ proof-of-work consensus protocols to validate and add transactions into hashchains. These protocols stimulate competition among miners in solving cryptopuzzles (e.g. SHA-256 hash computation in Bitcoin) in…