Posts Tagged ‘PhilippJovanovic’
[DotSecurity2017] Collective Authorities: Transparency & Decentralized Trust
In the labyrinthine landscape of digital governance, where singular sentinels succumb to sabotage or subversion, the paradigm of collective oversight emerges as a bulwark of resilience and reliability. Philipp Jovanovic, a cryptographer and postdoctoral researcher at EPFL’s Decentralized and Distributed Systems Lab, expounded this ethos at dotSecurity 2017, advocating for cothorities—cooperative clusters that distribute dominion, diminishing dependence on solitary stewards. Drawing from his expertise in provable security and distributed systems, Philipp illustrated how such syndicates safeguard services from time synchronization to software dissemination, fostering proactive transparency that eclipses centralized counterparts in robustness and accountability.
Philipp’s exposition began with authorities’ ubiquity: time servers calibrating clocks, DNS resolvers mapping monikers, certificate issuers endorsing identities—each pivotal yet precarious, vulnerable to breaches that cascade into chaos. A compromised chronometer corrupts certificates’ cadence; a DNS defector diverts domains to deceit. Traditional transparency—audits’ afterthoughts—proves reactive and rife with risk, susceptible to suppression or subversion. Cothorities counter this: constellations of collaborators, each holding shards of sovereignty, converging via consensus protocols to certify collective conduct.
At cothorities’ core lies collective signing: a threshold scheme where k-of-n nodes must concur, thwarting unilateral usurpation. Philipp probed protocols like ByzCoin, blending proof-of-work with practical Byzantine fault tolerance—blocks bolstered by collective endorsements, thwarting 51% sieges. Applications abound: randomness beacons via verifiable delay functions, sharded secrets yielding bias-resistant beacons; decentralized updates where pre-releases procure co-signatures post-verification, ensuring binary fidelity. EPFL’s instantiation—CoSi’s cascade—scales signatures sans synchrony, enabling efficient endorsements for vast validations.
This framework fortifies federated fabrics: software sanctums where binaries bear blockchain-like blessings, users verifying via viewer tools. Philipp’s prototype: Update Cothority, developers dispatching drafts, nodes nurturing builds—collective attestation attesting authenticity. Scalability’s symphony: logarithmic latencies, sub-minute settlements—throughput trouncing Bitcoin’s bottleneck.
Cothorities’ creed: decentralization’s dividend, transparency’s triumph—authorities augmented, trust atomized.
Singular Sentinels’ Susceptibility
Philipp parsed perils: time’s tampering topples TLS; DNS’s duplicity dupes domains. Audits’ inadequacy: reactive, repressible—cothorities’ corrective: syndicates’ synergy, threshold’s thwarts.
Protocols’ Pantheon and Applications’ Array
ByzCoin’s blend: PoW’s prelude, PBFT’s pact—CoSi’s cascade, sharding’s shards. Randomness’ radiance: beacons’ bias-bane; updates’ utopia: co-signed sanctity.