Summary: The authors analyze privacy in the Lightning Network. They present 3 main attacks based on publicly available information to learn information that is intended to be secret.
George Kappos (UCL), Haaroon Yousaf (UCL), Ania M. Piotrowska (UCL, NYM Technologies), Sanket Kanjalkar (UIUC), Sergi Delgado-Segura (PISA Research), Andrew Miller (UIUC), and Sarah Meiklejohn (UCL)
Summary: The authors propose a practical, simple, and clean model of asynchronous non-Byzantine consensus.
Bryan Ford (EPFL), Philipp Jovanovic (UCL), Ewa Syta (Trinity College Hartford)
Summary: The authors identify that in leader based consensus protocols, a malicious leader can manipulate transaction ordering. They propose a third fundamental property (in addition to consistency and liveness) of consensus: order-fairness. They propose a new class of consensus protocols called Aequitas, which achieve all three properties.
M Kelkar, F Zhang, S Goldfeder, A Juels (All Cornell University, Cornell Tech)
Summary: The authors show how to build a tailored protocol for threshold ECDSA with cheater detection and present a highly efficient protocol that allows players to participate without needing to be online at the same time.
Rosario Gennaro (CUNY) and Steven Goldfeder (Cornell Tech/ Offchain Labs)
Summary: The authors present an idealized version of the proposed Ethereum 2.0 “beacon chain,” a proof-of-stake-based consensus protocol that combines Casper FFG, a finality tool, with LMD GHOST, a fork-choice rule.
Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum Foundation), Diego Hernandez (SJSU), Thor Kamphefner (SJSU), Khiem Pham (VinAI Research), Zhi Qiao (SJSU), Danny Ryan (Ethereum Foundation), Juhyeok Sin (SJSU), Ying Wang (SJSU), Yan X Zhang (SJSU)
Summary: The authors propose a natural, streamlined protocol for constructing consensus protocols which proceeds in synchronized epochs. Players notarize blocks, and an epoch is finalized when all blocks in it are notarized.
Benjamin Y Chan and Elaine Shi (All Cornell University)
Summary: Twins is a new way to test Byzantine Fault Tolerant systems by running two instances of a node with the same identity. Twins can systematically generate attack scenarios and execute them in a controlled manner to check for desired system properties.
Shehar Bano, Alberto Sonnino, Andrey Chursin, Dmitri Perelman, Dahlia Malkhi (All Calibra)
Summary: Chainlink VRF utilizes verifiable random functions to generate randomness that is verifiable on-chain.
Chainlink Research Team
Summary: The researchers explore the precise latency to commit measured in time of byzantine broadcast. They propose the first byzantine broadcast protocol with optimal good-case latency.
Ittai Abraham (VMware Research), Kartik Nayak (Duke), Ling Ren (UIUC), and Zhuolun Xiang (UIUC)
Summary: The authors propose a standard for proof of liabilities and reserves in a way that preserves privacy while increasing transparency for users. It combines previously devised cryptographic techniques into a layered solution with predefined levels of privacy in the form of gadgets.
Konstantinos Chalkias, Kevin Lewi, Payman Mohassel, Valeria Nikolaenko (All Calibra)
AWARDS
Dawn Song was awarded 3
Test-of-Time Awards
at the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy ‘20 on May 18-20, 2020. Watch the
Presentation
of the Test of Time Awards by Prof. David Evans.
