The start of 2024 brings a fresh array of insightful content and learning experiences in the world of blockchain. Our latest research, covers DAOs, DeFi, Zero-Knowledge Proofs and etc. This newsletter also features highlights from the recent winter retreat in Switzerland. As we progress through the year, look forward to more in-depth research, expert insights, and the latest trends in blockchain from the IC3 team. And don't forget to save the date for The Science of Blockchain Conference (SBC'24)! This year IC3 is bringing it to the city of New York! | |
|
DAOs Must Confront Dark DAOs — Or Fall Under Their Shadow by James Austgen (Cornell, IC3), Andrés Fábrega (Cornell, IC3), Sarah Allen (Flashbots, IC3), Kushal Babel (Cornell, IC3), Mahimna Kelkar (Cornell, IC3), Ari Juels (Cornell, IC3):
-
The authors demonstrate that vote-buying in DAOs can be deceptively simple, particularly through methods like liquid staking, and often remains concealed from the public. They have created a end-to-end demo system (see video below) to highlight such risks.
| |
|
SpecVerilog: Adapting Information Flow Control for Secure Speculation by Drew Zagieboylo (Cornell), Charles Sherk (Cornell), Andrew C. Myers (Cornell, IC3), and G. Edward Suh (Cornell):
-
The authors focus on statically verifying speculative security of processor designs at the RTL level. They propose an extension to a security-typed hardware description language. Their approach uses erasure labels to represent transiently accessed or modified data and ensures its erasure under misspeculation.🏆This paper won the 2023 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) Distinguished Paper Award.
Law’s Detrimental Reliance on Intermediaries by Carla L. Reyes (SMU, IC3):
- The author details how blockchain's decentralized nature highlights the shortcomings of the legal system's current reliance on intermediaries, thereby posing a challenge to the established legitimacy of the law in the context of blockchain.
The Role of User-Agent Interactions on Mobile Money Practices in Kenya and Tanzania by Karen Sowon (CMU), Edith Luhanga (CMU-Africa), Lorrie Faith Cranor (CMU), Giulia Fanti (CMU, IC3), Conrad Tucker (CMU) and Assane Gueye (CMU-Africa):
- The authors conducted a study on mobile money (MoMo) in Africa, highlighting its role in financial inclusion. Focusing on user and agent interactions, this study, involving 72 interviews in Kenya and Tanzania, uncovers that users and agents often devise workarounds to system limitations. While these practices are beneficial, they also introduce new risks, which a reevaluation of ecosystem security, privacy, and regulatory policies is needed.
- The authors have developed a fully distributed zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) protocols to significantly improve blockchain scalability. By distributing the ZKP generation across multiple machines, their protocols, based on the efficient Plonk system, dramatically reduce prover time and communication overhead. The implementation named Pianist, showcases improvements in processing transactions rapidly with minimal communication per machine.
- The authors constructed a sublinear-time single-server Private Information Retrieval (PIR) scheme, achieving optimal client storage and server computation with only the reliance on One Way Functions (OWF). This scheme is a departure from traditional single-server PIR approaches, utilizing lightweight cryptography like Pseudorandom Functions (PRFs) instead of complex Homomorphic Encryption. Remarkably efficient in both computational and communication aspects, their scheme marks the first practical implementation of a single-server sublinear-time PIR. In real-world applications, such as querying large databases, their scheme demonstrates exceptional performance, outpacing current linear-time solutions and the fastest two-server schemes.
| |
Save the Date - SBC 2024 is Coming to NYC! | Mark your calendars! IC3 is thrilled to announce that the Science of Blockchain Conference (SBC) 2024 will be held in New York City from August 7-9, 2024. This is an event you won't want to miss, with more details to be revealed soon. For those interested in sponsorship opportunities, stay tuned – we'll be sharing all the necessary information shortly. Get ready for an unforgettable blockchain experience in the heart of NYC! | |
|
🏆Congrats to IC3 Faculty Prof. Giulia Fanti (CMU)! She has been awarded the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award by The National Science Foundation (NSF), a prestigious grant to junior faculty for a five-year period, aimed at supporting both research and educational endeavors. Prof. Fanti's research interests span the algorithmic foundations of blockchains, distributed systems, privacy-preserving technologies, and machine learning.
| |
🌟Discover IC3 faculty Sarah Meiklejohn's seminal research on the Bitcoin transaction graph and the scientific process behind it. Read the full story here: Wired Article. | |
|
Copyright © 2017-2023
The Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3)
| | | | |
