SoK of Used Cryptography in Blockchain

Mayank Raikwar; Danilo Gligoroski; Katina Kralevska

Paper 2019/735

SoK of Used Cryptography in Blockchain

Mayank Raikwar, Danilo Gligoroski, and Katina Kralevska

Abstract

The underlying fundaments of blockchain are cryptography and cryptographic concepts that provide reliable and secure decentralized solutions. Although many recent papers study the use-cases of blockchain in different industrial areas, such as finance, health care, legal relations, IoT, information security, and consensus building systems, only few studies scrutinize the cryptographic concepts used in blockchain. To the best of our knowledge, there is no Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) that gives a complete picture of the existing cryptographic concepts which have been deployed or have the potential to be deployed in blockchain. In this paper, we thoroughly review and systematize all cryptographic concepts which are already used in blockchain. Additionally, we give a list of cryptographic concepts which have not yet been applied but have big potentials to improve the current blockchain solutions. We also include possible instantiations of these cryptographic concepts in the blockchain domain. Last but not least, we explicitly postulate 21 challenging problems that cryptographers interested in blockchain can work on.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Published elsewhere. IEEE ACCESS
DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2946983
Keywords: Blockchain consensus hash function signature encryption zero-knowledge proofs access control accumulator
Contact author(s): mayank raikwar @ ntnu no
danilog @ ntnu no
katinak @ ntnu no
History: 2020-01-31: last of 3 revisions; 2019-06-21: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2019/735
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2019/735,
      author = {Mayank Raikwar and Danilo Gligoroski and Katina Kralevska},
      title = {{SoK} of Used Cryptography in Blockchain},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2019/735},
      year = {2019},
      doi = {10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2946983},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/735}
}