How should a blockchain keep a secret?

tl;dr: I was at the Next-Generation Secure Distributed Computing seminar at Schloss Dagstuhl and spoke about how a blockchain should keep a secret.

Slides: here.

Abstract: In this talk, we survey results & challenges around generating, maintaining and using a shared secret amongst the validators of a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain.

In the first part, we discuss techniques for generating a secret. We start with secret sharing in the threshold setting and then in the weighted setting that arises in PoS blockchains. We then introduce publicly-verifiable secret sharing (PVSS), explaining why it could be an ideal primitive to build distributed key generation (DKG) protocols from. Lastly, we discuss the new “silent setup” setting¹$^,$²$^,$³$^,$⁴ for bootstrapping threshold cryptosystems without a DKG or any explicit secret sharing (previously known as “ad hoc groups” in the literature).

In the second part, we discuss the threat of collusion attacks in the PoS attacks, where validators stand to profit by exposing the shared secret or a function of it (e.g., the plaintext obtained after threshold decryption under the shared secret). We present three different collusion attacks which are all detectable-but-unpunishable. We then give a TEE-based approach that could prevent collusion and call for more research in this direction.

In the third part, we discuss some new techniques used to speed up threshold cryptosystems. We begin by reminding practitioners that Lagrange interpolation in threshold cryptosystems can and should be done via an optimized quasilinear time algorithm, instead of quadratic⁵. Then, we present new results on threshold cryptosystems that use group elements as secret key⁶$^,$⁷$^,$⁸. Lastly, we present an exciting new direction on batching threshold cryptosystems so that communication during aggregation is independent of the batch size.

Overall, we highlight important research problems in both the theory and the practice of threshold cryptography.

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