Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

6-2021

Abstract

Equivocation is one of the most fundamental problems that need to be solved when designing distributed protocols. Traditional methods to defeat equivocation rely on trusted hardware or particular assumptions, which may hinder their adoption in practice. The advent of blockchain and decentralized cryptocurrencies provides an auspicious breakthrough paradigm to resolve the problem above. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based solution to address contractual equivocation, which supports user-defined fine-grained policybased equivocation. Specifically, users will be de-incentive if the statements they made breach the predefined access rules. The core of our solution is a newly introduced primitive named Policy-Authentication-Preventing Signature (PoAPS), which combined with a deposit mechanism allows a signer to make conflict statements corresponding to a policy to be penalized. We present a generic construction of PoAPS based on Policy-Based Verifiable Secret Sharing (PBVSS) and demonstrate its practicality via a concrete implementation in the blockchain. Compared with the existing solutions that only handle specific types of equivocation, our proposed approach is more generic and can be instantiated to deal with various kinds of equivocation.

Keywords

Equivocation, Blockchain, Digital signatures, Verifiable secret sharing

Discipline

Information Security

Research Areas

Information Systems and Management

Publication

Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Virtual Conference, June 7-11

First Page

859

Last Page

871

ISBN

9781450382878

Identifier

10.1145/3433210.3437516

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

Virtual Conference

Additional URL

http://doi.org/10.1145/3433210.3437516

Download

Share

COinS