5 Search Results for "Magri, Bernardo"

Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2025.6
Hierarchical Consensus: Scalability Through Optimism and Weak Liveness

Authors: Pedro Antonino, Antoine Durand, and A. W. Roscoe

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 356, 39th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2025)

Abstract
Scalability is a central concern of Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) distributed protocols. The ubiquitous approach to work around the well-known Dolev-Reischuk Ω(n²) communication complexity lower bound is to use a random selection process to draw a hopefully small committee from a population of agents to run the communication-heavy protocol. We propose a notion of hierarchical consensus that combines two sub-protocols: an optimistic primary sub-protocol that can tolerate less than 1/2 failures and a fallback secondary protocol that can tolerate less than 1/3 failures; we achieve the higher failure threshold by requiring a weaker notion of liveness for the primary. This distinction between the level of fault tolerance between primary and secondary is reflected in the size of committees implementing these protocols. For a population of agents with close to 2/3 of honest agents, we need to select a committee with hundreds of agents to reach the level of tolerance expected for the primary, whereas we need thousands to reach the level expected for the secondary with a very small probability of error ε. Our hierarchical construct is such that if the primary comes to a decision, it can simply propagate it to the secondary protocol, so it does not need to properly engage in an agreement protocol independently. Our architecture is flexible and allows us to use our technique for most protocols that are based on random sampling. By studying hierarchical protocols, we discovered new theoretical results of independent interest. Specifically, the ability to handover from a primary protocol requires a new Justifiability property that allows agents to pre-decide on a value, such that if the protocol decides, it must be on that pre-decided value.
Cite as

Pedro Antonino, Antoine Durand, and A. W. Roscoe. Hierarchical Consensus: Scalability Through Optimism and Weak Liveness. In 39th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 356, pp. 6:1-6:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{antonino_et_al:LIPIcs.DISC.2025.6,
  author =	{Antonino, Pedro and Durand, Antoine and Roscoe, A. W.},
  title =	{{Hierarchical Consensus: Scalability Through Optimism and Weak Liveness}},
  booktitle =	{39th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2025)},
  pages =	{6:1--6:20},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-402-4},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{356},
  editor =	{Kowalski, Dariusz R.},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2025.6},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-248232},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2025.6},
  annote =	{Keywords: Hierarchical, Handover, Justifiability, Consensus, Distributed Systems, Blockchain}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.19
Two-Tier Black-Box Blockchains and Application to Instant Layer-1 Payments

Authors: Michele Ciampi, Yun Lu, Rafail Ostrovsky, and Vassilis Zikas

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 354, 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)

Abstract
Common blockchain protocols are monolithic, i.e., their security relies on a single assumption, e.g., honest majority of hashing power (Bitcoin) or stake (Cardano, Algorand, Ethereum). In contrast, so-called optimistic approaches (Thunderella, Meshcash) rely on a combination of assumptions to achieve faster transaction liveness. We revisit, redesign, and augment the optimistic paradigm to a tiered approach. Our design assumes a primary (Tier 1) and a secondary (Tier 2, also referred to as fallback) blockchain, and achieves full security also in a tiered fashion: If the assumption underpinning the primary chain holds, then we guarantee safety, liveness and censorship resistance, irrespectively of the status of the fallback chain. And even if the primary assumption fails, all security properties are still satisfied (albeit with a temporary slow down) provided the fallback assumption holds. To our knowledge, no existing optimistic or tiered approach preserves both safety and liveness when any one of its underlying blockchain (assumptions) fails. The above is achieved by a new detection-and-recovery mechanism that links the two blockchains, so that any violation of safety, liveness, or censorship resistance on the (faster) primary blockchain is temporary - it is swiftly detected and recovered on the secondary chain - and thus cannot result in a persistent fork or halt of the blockchain ledger. We instantiate the above paradigm using a primary chain based on proof of reputation (PoR) and a fallback chain based on proof of stake (PoS). Our construction uses the PoR and PoS blockchains in a mostly black-box manner - where rather than assuming a concrete construction we distil abstract properties on the two blockchains that are sufficient for applying our tiered methodology. In fact, choosing reputation as the resource of the primary chain opens the door to an incentive mechanism - which we devise and analyze - that tokenizes reputation in order to deter cheating and boost participation (on both the primary/PoR and the fallback/PoS blockchain). As we demonstrate, such tokenization in combination with interpreting reputation as a built-in system-wide credit score, allows for embedding in our two-tiered methodology a novel mechanism which provides collateral-free, multi-use payment-channel-like functionality where payments can be instantly confirmed.
Cite as

Michele Ciampi, Yun Lu, Rafail Ostrovsky, and Vassilis Zikas. Two-Tier Black-Box Blockchains and Application to Instant Layer-1 Payments. In 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 354, pp. 19:1-19:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{ciampi_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2025.19,
  author =	{Ciampi, Michele and Lu, Yun and Ostrovsky, Rafail and Zikas, Vassilis},
  title =	{{Two-Tier Black-Box Blockchains and Application to Instant Layer-1 Payments}},
  booktitle =	{7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)},
  pages =	{19:1--19:24},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-400-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{354},
  editor =	{Avarikioti, Zeta and Christin, Nicolas},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.19},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-247380},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.19},
  annote =	{Keywords: Fault tolerant blockchain, instantly confirmed payments}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.16
Nakamoto Consensus from Multiple Resources

Authors: Mirza Ahad Baig, Christoph U. Günther, and Krzysztof Pietrzak

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 354, 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)

Abstract
The blocks in the Bitcoin blockchain "record" the amount of work W that went into creating them through proofs of work. When honest parties control a majority of the work, consensus is achieved by picking the chain with the highest recorded weight. Resources other than work have been considered to secure such longest-chain blockchains. In Chia, blocks record the amount of disk-space S (via a proof of space) and sequential computational steps V (through a VDF). In this paper, we ask what weight functions Γ(S,V,W) (that assign a weight to a block as a function of the recorded space, speed, and work) are secure in the sense that whenever the weight of the resources controlled by honest parties is larger than the weight of adversarial parties, the blockchain is secure against private double-spending attacks. We completely classify such functions in an idealized "continuous" model: Γ(S,V,W) is secure against private double-spending attacks if and only if it is homogeneous of degree one in the "timed" resources V and W, i.e., αΓ(S,V,W) = Γ(S,α V, α W). This includes the Bitcoin rule Γ(S,V,W) = W and the Chia rule Γ(S,V,W) = S ⋅ V. In a more realistic model where blocks are created at discrete time-points, one additionally needs some mild assumptions on the dependency on S (basically, the weight should not grow too much if S is slightly increased, say linear as in Chia). Our classification is more general and allows various instantiations of the same resource. It provides a powerful tool for designing new longest-chain blockchains. E.g., consider combining different PoWs to counter centralization, say the Bitcoin PoW W₁ and a memory-hard PoW W₂. Previous work suggested to use W₁+W₂ as weight. Our results show that using e.g., √{W₁}⋅ √{W₂} or min{W₁,W₂} are also secure, and we argue that in practice these are much better choices.
Cite as

Mirza Ahad Baig, Christoph U. Günther, and Krzysztof Pietrzak. Nakamoto Consensus from Multiple Resources. In 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 354, pp. 16:1-16:23, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{baig_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2025.16,
  author =	{Baig, Mirza Ahad and G\"{u}nther, Christoph U. and Pietrzak, Krzysztof},
  title =	{{Nakamoto Consensus from Multiple Resources}},
  booktitle =	{7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)},
  pages =	{16:1--16:23},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-400-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{354},
  editor =	{Avarikioti, Zeta and Christin, Nicolas},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.16},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-247353},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.16},
  annote =	{Keywords: Nakamoto Consensus, Heaviest-chain Rule, Resource Theory}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ITC.2025.5
Information-Theoretic Random-Index PIR

Authors: Sebastian Kolby, Lawrence Roy, Jure Sternad, and Sophia Yakoubov

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 343, 6th Conference on Information-Theoretic Cryptography (ITC 2025)

Abstract
A Private Information Retrieval (PIR) protocol allows a client to learn the ith row of a database held by one or more servers, without revealing i to the servers. A Random-Index PIR (RPIR) protocol, introduced by Gentry et al. (TCC 2021), is a PIR protocol where, instead of being chosen by the client, i is random. This has applications in e.g. anonymous committee selection. Both PIR and RPIR protocols are interesting only if the communication complexity is smaller than the database size; otherwise, the trivial solution where the servers send the entire database suffices. Unlike PIR, where the client must send at least one message (to encode information about i), RPIR can be executed in a single round of server-to-client communication. In this paper, we study such one-round, information-theoretic RPIR protocols. The only known construction in this setting is SimpleMSRPIR (Gentry et al.), which requires the servers to communicate approximately N/2 bits, N being the database size. We show an Ω(√N) lower bound on communication complexity for one-round two-server information-theoretic RPIR, and a sublinear upper bound. Finally, we show how to use a sublinear amount of database-independent correlated randomness among multiple servers to get near-optimal online communication complexity (the size of one row plus the size of one index description per server).
Cite as

Sebastian Kolby, Lawrence Roy, Jure Sternad, and Sophia Yakoubov. Information-Theoretic Random-Index PIR. In 6th Conference on Information-Theoretic Cryptography (ITC 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 343, pp. 5:1-5:15, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{kolby_et_al:LIPIcs.ITC.2025.5,
  author =	{Kolby, Sebastian and Roy, Lawrence and Sternad, Jure and Yakoubov, Sophia},
  title =	{{Information-Theoretic Random-Index PIR}},
  booktitle =	{6th Conference on Information-Theoretic Cryptography (ITC 2025)},
  pages =	{5:1--5:15},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-385-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{343},
  editor =	{Gilboa, Niv},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITC.2025.5},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-243559},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ITC.2025.5},
  annote =	{Keywords: Private information retrieval, Multi-server, Lower bounds}
}
Document
Track A: Algorithms, Complexity and Games
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2020.55
Cryptographic Reverse Firewalls for Interactive Proof Systems

Authors: Chaya Ganesh, Bernardo Magri, and Daniele Venturi

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 168, 47th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2020)

Abstract
We study interactive proof systems (IPSes) in a strong adversarial setting where the machines of honest parties might be corrupted and under control of the adversary. Our aim is to answer the following, seemingly paradoxical, questions: - Can Peggy convince Vic of the veracity of an NP statement, without leaking any information about the witness even in case Vic is malicious and Peggy does not trust her computer? - Can we avoid that Peggy fools Vic into accepting false statements, even if Peggy is malicious and Vic does not trust her computer? At EUROCRYPT 2015, Mironov and Stephens-Davidowitz introduced cryptographic reverse firewalls (RFs) as an attractive approach to tackling such questions. Intuitively, a RF for Peggy/Vic is an external party that sits between Peggy/Vic and the outside world and whose scope is to sanitize Peggy’s/Vic’s incoming and outgoing messages in the face of subversion of her/his computer, e.g. in order to destroy subliminal channels. In this paper, we put forward several natural security properties for RFs in the concrete setting of IPSes. As our main contribution, we construct efficient RFs for different IPSes derived from a large class of Sigma protocols that we call malleable. A nice feature of our design is that it is completely transparent, in the sense that our RFs can be directly applied to already deployed IPSes, without the need to re-implement them.
Cite as

Chaya Ganesh, Bernardo Magri, and Daniele Venturi. Cryptographic Reverse Firewalls for Interactive Proof Systems. In 47th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2020). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 168, pp. 55:1-55:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020)

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@InProceedings{ganesh_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2020.55,
  author =	{Ganesh, Chaya and Magri, Bernardo and Venturi, Daniele},
  title =	{{Cryptographic Reverse Firewalls for Interactive Proof Systems}},
  booktitle =	{47th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2020)},
  pages =	{55:1--55:16},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-138-2},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2020},
  volume =	{168},
  editor =	{Czumaj, Artur and Dawar, Anuj and Merelli, Emanuela},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2020.55},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-124621},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2020.55},
  annote =	{Keywords: Subversion, Algorithm substitution attacks, Cryptographic reverse firewalls, Interactive proofs, Zero knowledge}
}
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