Transparency Overlays and Applications

Melissa Chase; Sarah Meiklejohn

Paper 2016/915

Transparency Overlays and Applications

Melissa Chase and Sarah Meiklejohn

Abstract

In this paper, we initiate a formal study of transparency, which in recent years has become an increasingly critical requirement for the systems in which people place trust. We present the abstract concept of a transparency overlay, which can be used in conjunction with any system to give it provable transparency guarantees, and then apply the overlay to two settings: Certificate Transparency and Bitcoin. In the latter setting, we show that the usage of our transparency overlay eliminates the need to engage in mining and allows users to store a single small value rather than the entire blockchain. Our transparency overlay is generically constructed from a signature scheme and a new primitive we call a dynamic list commitment, which in practice can be instantiated using a collision-resistant hash function.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Major revision. ACM CCS 2016
Keywords: transparency bitcoin provable security
Contact author(s): s meiklejohn @ ucl ac uk
History: 2016-09-22: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2016/915
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2016/915,
      author = {Melissa Chase and Sarah Meiklejohn},
      title = {Transparency Overlays and Applications},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2016/915},
      year = {2016},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/915}
}