This post tries to give a short overview of provable security in cryptocurrencies.
Provable Security
Provable security is a relatively new area within the cryptography discipline. The first papers in the modern cryptography (the one that starts from the seventies until now) do not have a rigorous security analysis. That is, with the exception of citation of concrete attacks, there is no attempt to meticulously formalize the adversary power and capabilities.For example, the paper "New Directions in Cryptography" by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, which is considered by most the beginning of modern cryptography (at least the public and civilian one), does not provide such rigorous analysis.
The publications from the cryptographic research…
Bernardo, the presenter, divided the talk in two parts: the first reviews main topics in Cryptography which would help the viewer to understand the presentation and the protocol itself. Whereas the second is about the protocol itself.
First Part - Cryptography background
- Commitments
- Coin Tossing/Guaranteed Output Delivery
- Verifiable Secret Sharing
Second Part - Proof-of-Stake…
Transaction malleability in cryptocurrencies
14 September 2016 5 mins read
Transaction malleability in cryptocurrencies - Input Output HongKong
In this article I'm going to provide a brief review of protection methods against replay attacks, arising from signature malleability of elliptic curve cryptography.
Problem
Most cryptocurrencies are based on public-key cryptography. Each owner transfers coins to the next one digitally signing the transactionTx containing the public key of the next owner.Thus everyone can verify that the sender wants to send her coins to the recipient, but a problem arises - how to prevent the inclusion of transactin Tx in the blockchain twice?
Without such a protection an unscrupulous recipient may repeat Tx as long as the sender has enough coins at his balance, making it impossible to reuse the same address for more then 1 transaction.
In particular the adversary can withdraw some coins from an exchange and repeat this transaction until there are no coins left on exchange (such attacks have already been…
Ethereum Classic: An Update
9 September 2016 8 mins read
I wanted to draft a brief update on IOHK's efforts on Ethereum Classic (ETC). We've had the opportunity to schedule more than three dozen meetings with developers, community managers and academic institutions. We've also managed to have several long discussions with several of the community groups supporting ETC to get a better sense of commitments, goals and philosophy…
When you starting a Bitcoin node it is downloading all the transactions for more than 7 years in order to check them all. People are often asking in the community resources whether it is possible to avoid that. In a more interesting formulation the question would be “can we get fullnode security without going from genesis block”? The question becomes even more important if we…