Related papers: Securing Consensus from Long-Range Attacks through…
Existing Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols address only threshold failures, where the participating nodes fail independently of each other, each one fails equally likely, and the protocol's guarantees follow from a simple…
Distributed ledgers are common in the industry. Some of them can use blockchains as their underlying infrastructure. A blockchain requires participants to agree on its contents. This can be achieved via a consensus protocol, and several BFT…
Most of the Blockchain permissioned systems employ Byzantine fault-tolerance (BFT) consensus protocols to ensure that honest validators agree on the order for appending entries to their ledgers. In this paper, we study the performance and…
Proof-of-work (PoW) is an algorithmic tool used to secure networks by imposing a computational cost on participating devices. Unfortunately, traditional PoW schemes require that correct devices perform computational work perpetually, even…
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-Work is a consensus algorithm where miners solve cryptographic puzzles to mine blocks and obtain a reward through some Block Reward Mechanism (BRM). PoW blockchain faces the problem of centralization due to the formation of mining…
Since its advent in 2011, boson sampling has been a preferred candidate for demonstrating quantum advantage because of its simplicity and near-term requirements compared to other quantum algorithms. We propose to use a variant, called…
Proof-of-stake blockchain protocols have emerged as a compelling paradigm for organizing distributed ledger systems. In proof-of-stake (PoS), a subset of stakeholders participate in validating a growing ledger of transactions. For the…
In September 2022, Ethereum transitioned from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) during "the merge" - making it the largest PoS cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization. With this work, we present a comprehensive…
Blockchain technology provides an auditable and tamper-proof distributed storage infrastructure for information records. This can be leveraged to support distributed workflow management. Compared to proof-of-work consensus, popularized by…
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…
Blockchain protocols differ in fundamental ways, including the mechanics of selecting users to produce blocks (e.g., proof-of-work vs. proof-of-stake) and the method to establish consensus (e.g., longest chain rules vs. BFT-inspired…
The Nakamoto consensus protocol underlying the Bitcoin blockchain uses proof of work as a voting mechanism. Honest miners who contribute hashing power towards securing the chain try to extend the longest chain they are aware of. Despite its…
Consensus mechanisms are the core of any blockchain system. However, the majority of these mechanisms do not target federated learning directly nor do they aid in the aggregation step. This paper introduces Proof of Reasoning (PoR), a novel…
In this paper, we propose two models for scaling the transaction throughput in Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchain networks. In the first approach, a mathematical model has derived for optimal transaction throughput for PoW based longest…
We lay the foundations for a blockchain scheme, whose consensus is reached via a proof of work algorithm based on the solution of consecutive discrete logarithm problems over the point group of elliptic curves. In the considered…
Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that has applications in many domains such as cryptocurrency, smart contracts, supply chain management, and many others. Distributed consensus is a fundamental component of blockchain systems…
Security analysis of blockchain technology is an active domain of research. There has been both cryptographic and game-theoretic security analysis of Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. Prominent work includes the cryptographic security…
Known as a distributed ledger technology (DLT), blockchain has attracted much attention due to its properties such as decentralization, security, immutability and transparency, and its potential of servicing as an infrastructure for various…
A proof of work (PoW) is an important cryptographic construct enabling a party to convince others that they invested some effort in solving a computational task. Arguably, its main impact has been in the setting of cryptocurrencies such as…