No Arabic abstract
Nakamoto invented the longest chain protocol, and claimed its security by analyzing the private double-spend attack, a race between the adversary and the honest nodes to grow a longer chain. But is it the worst attack? We answer the question in the affirmative for three classes of longest chain protocols, designed for different consensus models: 1) Nakamotos original Proof-of-Work protocol; 2) Ouroboros and SnowWhite Proof-of-Stake protocols; 3) Chia Proof-of-Space protocol. As a consequence, exact characterization of the maximum tolerable adversary power is obtained for each protocol as a function of the average block time normalized by the network delay. The security analysis of these protocols is performed in a unified manner by a novel method of reducing all attacks to a race between the adversary and the honest nodes.
Fault-tolerant distributed systems move the trust in a single party to a majority of parties participating in the protocol. This makes blockchain based crypto-currencies possible: they allow parties to agree on a total order of transactions without a trusted third party. To trust a distributed system, the security of the protocol and the correctness of the implementation must be indisputable. We present the first machine checked proof that guarantees both safety and liveness for a consensus algorithm. We verify a Proof of Stake (PoS) Nakamoto-style blockchain (NSB) protocol, using the foundational proof assistant Coq. In particular, we consider a PoS NSB in a synchronous network with a static set of corrupted parties. We define execution semantics for this setting and prove chain growth, chain quality, and common prefix which together imply both safety and liveness.
Summarising data as text helps people make sense of it. It also improves data discovery, as search algorithms can match this text against keyword queries. In this paper, we explore the characteristics of text summaries of data in order to understand how meaningful summaries look like. We present two complementary studies: a data-search diary study with 69 students, which offers insight into the information needs of people searching for data; and a summarisation study, with a lab and a crowdsourcing component with overall 80 data-literate participants, which produced summaries for 25 datasets. In each study we carried out a qualitative analysis to identify key themes and commonly mentioned dataset attributes, which people consider when searching and making sense of data. The results helped us design a template to create more meaningful textual representations of data, alongside guidelines for improving data-search experience overall.
Malicious software (malware) is a major cyber threat that has to be tackled with Machine Learning (ML) techniques because millions of new malware examples are injected into cyberspace on a daily basis. However, ML is vulnerable to attacks known as adversarial examples. In this paper, we survey and systematize the field of Adversarial Malware Detection (AMD) through the lens of a unified conceptual framework of assumptions, attacks, defenses, and security properties. This not only leads us to map attacks and defenses to partial order structures, but also allows us to clearly describe the attack-defense arms race in the AMD context. We draw a number of insights, including: knowing the defenders feature set is critical to the success of transfer attacks; the effectiveness of practical evasion attacks largely depends on the attackers freedom in conducting manipulations in the problem space; knowing the attackers manipulation set is critical to the defenders success; the effectiveness of adversarial training depends on the defenders capability in identifying the most powerful attack. We also discuss a number of future research directions.
We present a riemannian structure on the disk that has a remarkably rich structure. Geodesics are hypocycloids and the (negative of the) laplacian has integer spectrum with multiplicity the Dirichlet divisor function. Eigenfunctions of the laplacian are orthogonal polynomials naturally suited to the analysis of acoustic scattering in layered media.
In this paper we study the subset of generalized quantum measurements on finite dimensional systems known as local operations and classical communication (LOCC). While LOCC emerges as the natural class of operations in many important quantum information tasks, its mathematical structure is complex and difficult to characterize. Here we provide a precise description of LOCC and related operational classes in terms of quantum instruments. Our formalism captures both finite round protocols as well as those that utilize an unbounded number of communication rounds. While the set of LOCC is not topologically closed, we show that finite round LOCC constitutes a compact subset of quantum operations. Additionally we show the existence of an open ball around the completely depolarizing map that consists entirely of LOCC implementable maps. Finally, we demonstrate a two-qubit map whose action can be approached arbitrarily close using LOCC, but nevertheless cannot be implemented perfectly.