Sidechain technology has been envisioned as a promising solution to accelerate today's public blockchains in terms of scalability and interoperability. By relying on the mainchain for security, different sidechains can formulate their own rules to reach consensus. Although the literature has considered the possibility of using consensus protocols in the sidechain, so far a tailor-made consensus protocol for sidechains with high performance and formal security proof has not been attempted. To fill this gap, we introduce Vulcan, a low overhead, highly efficient, security provable sidechain protocol. Vulcan makes use of smart contracts to ensure that only one block proposed in the sidechain will be enforced on the mainchain in each round, achieving consensus in an efficient manner. We give formal specifications of Vulcan which ensures safety and liveness with @math validators (total number of @math ) without online requirement of clients. For security analysis, we give formal security definitions and proofs under Universally Composable Security (UCS) model. As a proof of concept, we implement Vulcan and evaluate it in Ethereum testnet.
Recent literature finds that UCS framework has been widely used to prove the security of off-chain solutions @cite_27 @cite_5 @cite_31 @cite_9 @cite_20 @cite_1 . Given the serious monetary loss when off-chain protocols are massively applied, we suggest that the security of each off-chain protocol should be formally proved.
@cite_9 @cite_1 @cite_27 @cite_5 @cite_31 @cite_20
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We propose a new security measure for commitment protocols, called Universally Composable (UC) Commitment. The measure guarantees that commitment protocols behave like an "ideal commitment service," even when concurrently composed with an arbitrary set of protocols. This is a strong guarantee: it implies that security is maintained even when an unbounded number of copies of the scheme are running concurrently, it implies non-malleability (not only with respect to other copies of the same protocol but even with respect to other protocols), it provides resilience to selective decommitment, and more. Unfortunately, two-party uc commitment protocols do not exist in the plain model. However, we construct two-party uc commitment protocols, based on general complexity assumptions, in the common reference string model where all parties have access to a common string taken from a predetermined distribution. The protocols are non-interactive, in the sense that both the commitment and the opening phases consist of a single message from the committer to the receiver. This paper introduces a novel technique for access by a cognitive Secondary User (SU) to a spectrum with an incumbent Primary User (PU), which uses Type-I Hybrid ARQ. The technique allows the SU to perform selective retransmissions of previously corrupted SU data packets. The temporal redundancy introduced by the primary ARQ protocol and by the selective SU retransmission process can be exploited by the SU receiver to perform Interference Cancellation (IC) over the entire interference pattern, thus creating a "clean" channel for the decoding of the concurrent message. The chain decoding technique, initiated by a successful decoding operation of a SU or PU message, consists in the iterative application of IC, as previously corrupted messages become decodable. Based on this scheme, we design an optimal policy that maximizes the SU throughput under a constraint on the average long-term PU throughput degradation. We show that the optimal policy can be found by first optimizing the SU access policy using a Markov Decision Process formulation, and then applying a chain decoding protocol defined by five basic rules. Such an approach enables a compact state representation of the protocol, and its efficient numerical optimization. Finally, we show by numerical results the throughput benefit of the proposed technique. Since the 1980s, two approaches have been developed for analyzing security protocols. One of the approaches relies on a computational model that considers issues of complexity and probability. This approach captures a strong notion of security, guaranteed against all probabilistic polynomial-time attacks. The other approach relies on a symbolic model of protocol executions in which cryptographic primitives are treated as black boxes. Since the seminal work of Dolev and Yao, it has been realized that this latter approach enables significantly simpler and often automated proofs. However, the guarantees that it offers have been quite unclear. In this paper, we show that it is possible to obtain the best of both worlds: fully automated proofs and strong, clear security guarantees. Specifically, for the case of protocols that use signatures and asymmetric encryption, we establish that symbolic integrity and secrecy proofs are sound with respect to the computational model. The main new challenges concern secrecy properties for which we obtain the first soundness result for the case of active adversaries. Our proofs are carried out using Casrul, a fully automated tool. We provide a method for deciding the insecurity of cryptographic protocols in presence of the standard Dolev-Yao intruder (with a finite number of sessions) extended with so-called oracle rules, i.e., deduction rules that satisfy certain conditions. As an instance of this general framework, we ascertain that protocol insecurity is in NP for an intruder that can exploit the properties of the XOR operator. This operator is frequently used in cryptographic protocols but cannot be handled in most protocol models. An immediate consequence of our proof is that checking whether a message can be derived by an intruder (using XOR) is in P. We also apply our framework to an intruder that exploits properties of certain encryption modes such as cipher block chaining (CBC).