Related papers: The Treasury Proof Ledger: A Cryptographic Framewo…
Fuelled by the success (and hype) around cryptocurrencies, distributed ledger technologies (DLT), particularly blockchains, have gained a lot of attention from a wide spectrum of audience who perceive blockchains as a key to carry out…
This paper surveys innovative protocols that enhance the programming functionality of the Bitcoin blockchain, a key part of the "Bitcoin Ecosystem." Bitcoin utilizes the Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) model and a stack-based script…
Per-token billing is now the standard pricing model for commercial large language models (LLMs), so the honesty of reported token counts directly affects what users pay. We show that this kind of billing is hard to audit by design:…
In conventional PKI, CAs are assumed to be fully trusted. However, in practice, CAs' absolute responsibility for providing trustworthiness caused major security and privacy issues. To prevent such issues, Google introduced the concept of…
Every year, criminals launder billions of dollars acquired from serious felonies (e.g., terrorism, drug smuggling, or human trafficking) harming countless people and economies. Cryptocurrencies, in particular, have developed as a haven for…
We introduce Auditable Proof-of-Work (APoW), a novel proof-of-work (PoW) construction inspired by Hashcash-style nonce searching, which enables the auditing of other miners' work through accountable re-scanning of the nonce space. The…
Evidence destruction and tempering is a time-tested tactic to protect the powerful perpetrators, criminals, and corrupt officials. Countries where law enforcing institutions and judicial system can be comprised, and evidence destroyed or…
Proofgold is a blockchain that supports formalized mathematics alongside standard cryptocurrency functionality. It incorporates logical constructs into the blockchain, including declarations of formal theories, definitions, propositions and…
As of July 15, 2023, Ethererum, which is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain [1] has around 410 Billion USD in total assets on chain (popularly referred to as total-value-locked, TVL) but has only 33 Billion USD worth of ETH staked in…
The Proof of Efficient Liquidity (PoEL) protocol, designed for specialised Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus-based blockchains that incorporate intrinsic DeFi applications, aims to support sustainable liquidity bootstrapping and network…
The blockchain paradigm provides a mechanism for content dissemination and distributed consensus on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. While this paradigm has been widely adopted in industry, it has not been carefully analyzed in terms of its…
The recent approval of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes new data protection requirements on data controllers and processors with respect to the processing of European Union (EU) residents' data. These requirements…
Private BitTorrent trackers enforce upload-to-download ratios to prevent free-riding, but suffer from three critical weaknesses: reputation cannot move between trackers, centralized servers create single points of failure, and upload…
Payment channel networks are an approach to improve the scalability of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. The Lightning Network is a payment channel network built for Bitcoin that is already used in practice. Because the Lightning Network…
In recent years, the confidentiality of smart contracts has become a fundamental requirement for practical applications. While many efforts have been made to develop architectural capabilities for enforcing confidential smart contracts, a…
Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency used worldwide. It provides pseudonymity to its users by establishing identity using public keys as transaction end-points. These transactions are recorded on an immutable public ledger called…
Total Value Locked (TVL) aims to measure the aggregate value of cryptoassets deposited in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols. Although blockchain data is public, the way TVL is computed is not well understood. In practice, its…
We propose a framework for threshold cryptosystems under a permissionless-economic model in which the participants are rational profit-maximizing entities. To date, threshold cryptosystems have been considered under permissioned settings…
The functionality that distributed ledger technology provides, i.e., an immutable and fraud-resistant registry with validation and verification mechanisms, has traditionally been implemented with a trusted third party. Due to the…
Privacy-preserving blockchain systems are essential for protecting transaction data, yet they must also provide auditability that enables auditors to recover participant identities and transaction amounts when warranted. Existing designs…