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Player-Replaceability and Forensic Support Are Two Sides of the Same (Crypto) Coin

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13950))

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Abstract

Player-replaceability is a property of a blockchain protocol that ensures every step of the protocol is executed by an unpredictably random (small) set of players; this guarantees security against a fully adaptive adversary and is a crucial property in building permissionless blockchains. Forensic Support is a property of a blockchain protocol that provides the ability, with cryptographic integrity, to identify malicious parties when there is a safety violation; this provides the ability to enforce punishments for adversarial behavior and is a crucial component of incentive mechanism designs for blockchains. Player-replaceability and strong forensic support are both desirable properties, yet, none of the existing blockchain protocols have both properties. Our main result is to construct a new BFT protocol that is player-replaceable and has maximum forensic support. The key invention is the notion of a “transition certificate”, without which we show that natural adaptations of extant BFT and longest chain protocols do not lead to the desired goal of simultaneous player-replaceability and forensic support. (The full version of paper is available in https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1513.)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Our paper discusses the forensic ability after a safety violation happens. In particular, we ignore when such a violation happens. The probability of such a safety violation has been shown in Ouroboros [20, Figure 8].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA

    Peiyao Sheng & Gerui Wang

  2. Beijing Academy of Blockchain and Edge Computing, Beijing, China

    Gerui Wang

  3. Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Kartik Nayak

  4. University of Washington at Seattle, Seattle, WA, USA

    Sreeram Kannan

  5. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Pramod Viswanath

Authors
  1. Peiyao Sheng
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  2. Gerui Wang
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  3. Kartik Nayak
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  4. Sreeram Kannan
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  5. Pramod Viswanath
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Peiyao Sheng or Kartik Nayak .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Foteini Baldimtsi

  2. University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Christian Cachin

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Sheng, P., Wang, G., Nayak, K., Kannan, S., Viswanath, P. (2024). Player-Replaceability and Forensic Support Are Two Sides of the Same (Crypto) Coin. In: Baldimtsi, F., Cachin, C. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13950. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47754-6_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47754-6_4

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-47754-6

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