Visible to the public Biblio

Filters: Author is Zikas, Vassilis  [Clear All Filters]
2019-12-11
Kerber, Thomas, Kiayias, Aggelos, Kohlweiss, Markulf, Zikas, Vassilis.  2019.  Ouroboros Crypsinous: Privacy-Preserving Proof-of-Stake. 2019 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP). :157–174.

We present Ouroboros Crypsinous, the first formally analyzed privacy-preserving proof-of-stake blockchain protocol. To model its security we give a thorough treatment of private ledgers in the (G)UC setting that might be of independent interest. To prove our protocol secure against adaptive attacks, we introduce a new coin evolution technique relying on SNARKs and key-private forward secure encryption. The latter primitive-and the associated construction-can be of independent interest. We stress that existing approaches to private blockchain, such as the proof-of-work-based Zerocash are analyzed only against static corruptions.

2019-02-13
Lu, Yun, Mitropoulos, Konstantinos, Ostrovsky, Rafail, Weinstock, Avraham, Zikas, Vassilis.  2018.  Cryptographically Secure Detection of Injection Attacks. Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. :2240–2242.
Direct Memory Access (DMA) attacks can allow attackers to access memory directly, bypassing OS supervision or software protections. In this work, we put forth and benchmark a cryptographically secure attestation scheme, which detects DMA attacks. In fact, our scheme detects any attack in a more general class of attacks which we call "direct injection". We prove security of our scheme under a realistic machine model which extends in a non-trivial manner a cryptographic model proposed by Lipton, Ostrovsky, and Zikas (ICALP 2016.) Despite the fact that our scheme, in its current form, protects against write-only attacks, both our security model and our scheme can be extended to allow the attacker to have additional read access to memory—thereby capturing leakage—as well as detecting more types of memory corruptions such as bit flips.