## CryptoDB

### Hamza Abusalah

#### Publications

Year
Venue
Title
2022
ASIACRYPT
The success of blockchains has led to ever-growing ledgers that are stored by all participating full nodes. In contrast, light clients only store small amounts of blockchain-related data and rely on the mediation of full nodes when interacting with the ledger. A broader adoption of blockchains calls for protocols that make this interaction trustless. We revisit the design of light-client blockchain protocols from the perspective of classical proof-system theory, and explain the role that proofs of sequential work (PoSWs) can play in it. To this end, we define a new primitive called succinct non-interactive argument of chain knowledge (SNACK), a non-interactive proof system that provides clear security guarantees to a verifier (a light client) even when interacting only with a single dishonest prover (a full node). We show how augmenting any blockchain with any graph-labeling PoSW (GL-PoSW) enables SNACK proofs for this blockchain. We also provide a unified and extended definition of GL-PoSWs covering all existing constructions, and describe two new variants. We then show how SNACKs can be used to construct light-client protocols, and highlight some deficiencies of existing designs, along with mitigations. Finally, we introduce incremental SNACKs which could potentially provide a new approach to light mining.
2019
EUROCRYPT
Proofs of sequential work (PoSW) are proof systems where a prover, upon receiving a statement $\chi$ and a time parameter T computes a proof $\phi (\chi ,T)$ which is efficiently and publicly verifiable. The proof can be computed in T sequential steps, but not much less, even by a malicious party having large parallelism. A PoSW thus serves as a proof that T units of time have passed since $\chi$ was received.PoSW were introduced by Mahmoody, Moran and Vadhan [MMV11], a simple and practical construction was only recently proposed by Cohen and Pietrzak [CP18].In this work we construct a new simple PoSW in the random permutation model which is almost as simple and efficient as [CP18] but conceptually very different. Whereas the structure underlying [CP18] is a hash tree, our construction is based on skip lists and has the interesting property that computing the PoSW is a reversible computation.The fact that the construction is reversible can potentially be used for new applications like constructing proofs of replication. We also show how to “embed” the sloth function of Lenstra and Weselowski [LW17] into our PoSW to get a PoSW where one additionally can verify correctness of the output much more efficiently than recomputing it (though recent constructions of “verifiable delay functions” subsume most of the applications this construction was aiming at).
2017
ASIACRYPT