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Composable Ledgers for Distributed Synchronic Web Archiving

Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries

Dinh, Thien-Nam D.; Pattengale, Nicholas D.

The Synchronic Web is a highly scalable notary infrastructure that provides tamper-evident data provenance for historical web data. In this document, we describe the applicability of this infrastructure for web archiving across three envisioned stages of adoption. We codify the core mechanism enabling the value proposition: a procedure for splitting and merging cryptographic information fluidly across blockchain-backed ledgers. Finally, we present preliminary performance results that indicate the feasibility of our approach for modern web archiving scales.

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Auditable, Available and Resilient Private Computation on the Blockchain via MPC

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

Cordi, Christopher; Frank, Michael P.; Gabert, Kasimir G.; Helinski, Carollan B.; Laros, James H.; Kolesnikov, Vladimir; Ladha, Abrahim; Pattengale, Nicholas D.

Simple but mission-critical internet-based applications that require extremely high reliability, availability, and verifiability (e.g., auditability) could benefit from running on robust public programmable blockchain platforms such as Ethereum. Unfortunately, program code running on such blockchains is normally publicly viewable, rendering these platforms unsuitable for applications requiring strict privacy of application code, data, and results. In this work, we investigate using MPC techniques to protect the privacy of a blockchain computation. While our main goal is to hide both the data and the computed function itself, we also consider the standard MPC setting where the function is public. We describe GABLE (Garbled Autonomous Bots Leveraging Ethereum), a blockchain MPC architecture and system. The GABLE architecture specifies the roles and capabilities of the players. GABLE includes two approaches for implementing MPC over blockchain: Garbled Circuits (GC), evaluating universal circuits, and Garbled Finite State Automata (GFSA). We formally model and prove the security of GABLE implemented over garbling schemes, a popular abstraction of GC and GFSA from (Bellare et al., CCS 2012). We analyze in detail the performance (including Ethereum gas costs) of both approaches and discuss the trade-offs. We implement a simple prototype of GABLE and report on the implementation issues and experience.

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Auditable, Available and Resilient Private Computation on the Blockchain via MPC

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

Cordi, Christopher; Frank, Michael P.; Gabert, Kasimir G.; Helinski, Carollan B.; Laros, James H.; Kolesnikov, Vladimir; Ladha, Abrahim; Pattengale, Nicholas D.

Simple but mission-critical internet-based applications that require extremely high reliability, availability, and verifiability (e.g., auditability) could benefit from running on robust public programmable blockchain platforms such as Ethereum. Unfortunately, program code running on such blockchains is normally publicly viewable, rendering these platforms unsuitable for applications requiring strict privacy of application code, data, and results. In this work, we investigate using MPC techniques to protect the privacy of a blockchain computation. While our main goal is to hide both the data and the computed function itself, we also consider the standard MPC setting where the function is public. We describe GABLE (Garbled Autonomous Bots Leveraging Ethereum), a blockchain MPC architecture and system. The GABLE architecture specifies the roles and capabilities of the players. GABLE includes two approaches for implementing MPC over blockchain: Garbled Circuits (GC), evaluating universal circuits, and Garbled Finite State Automata (GFSA). We formally model and prove the security of GABLE implemented over garbling schemes, a popular abstraction of GC and GFSA from (Bellare et al., CCS 2012). We analyze in detail the performance (including Ethereum gas costs) of both approaches and discuss the trade-offs. We implement a simple prototype of GABLE and report on the implementation issues and experience.

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Benchmarking blockchain-based gene-drug interaction data sharing methods: A case study from the iDASH 2019 secure genome analysis competition blockchain track

International Journal of Medical Informatics

Kuo, Tsung T.; Bath, Tyler; Ma, Shuaicheng; Pattengale, Nicholas D.; Yang, Meng; Cao, Yang; Chen, F.; Ding, Y.; Hudson, Corey H.; Kim, Jihoon; Pan, G.; Post, Kai; Xiong, Li; Sofia, H.J.; Ohno-Machado, Lucila

Background: Blockchain distributed ledger technology is just starting to be adopted in genomics and healthcare applications. Despite its increased prevalence in biomedical research applications, skepticism regarding the practicality of blockchain technology for real-world problems is still strong and there are few implementations beyond proof-of-concept. We focus on benchmarking blockchain strategies applied to distributed methods for sharing records of gene-drug interactions. We expect this type of sharing will expedite personalized medicine. Basic Procedures: We generated gene-drug interaction test datasets using the Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium (CPIC) resource. We developed three blockchain-based methods to share patient records on gene-drug interactions: Query Index, Index Everything, and Dual-Scenario Indexing. Main Findings: We achieved a runtime of about 60 s for importing 4,000 gene-drug interaction records from four sites, and about 0.5 s for a data retrieval query. Our results demonstrated that it is feasible to leverage blockchain as a new platform to share data among institutions. Principal Conclusions: We show the benchmarking results of novel blockchain-based methods for institutions to share patient outcomes related to gene-drug interactions. Our findings support blockchain utilization in healthcare, genomic and biomedical applications. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/tsungtingkuo/genedrug.

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The GABLE Report: Garbled Autonomous Bots Leveraging Ethereum

Frank, Michael P.; Cordi, Christopher N.; Gabert, Kasimir G.; Helinski, Carollan B.; Laros, James H.; Kolesnikov, Vladimir; Pattengale, Nicholas D.

Simple but mission-critical internet-based applications that require extremely high reliability and availability could potentially benefit from running on robust public programmable blockchain platforms such as Ethereum. Unfortunately, program code running on such blockchains is ordinarily publicly viewable, rendering these platforms unsuitable for applications requiring strict privacy of application code, data, and results. However, might it be possible to encode an application's business logic and data for these platforms in such a way that it becomes impossible for unauthorized parties to infer any meaningful information whatsoever about the semantics of the data, and the operations being performed on that data? In this report, we describe GABLE (Garbled Autonomous Bots Leveraging Ethereum), a system concept developed at Sandia that achieves this security goal in a limited, but still useful range of circumstances. GABLE, uses simple but effective algorithms to permit secure private execution of garbled state machines (and more efficient garbled circuits) on public computing resources. We give an example working implementation for garbled state machines, written using the Python and Solidity programming languages, and outline how our methods can be extended to support a more powerful garbled universal circuit model of computation. The capability embodied by the GABLE, system has significant potential applications, a few of which we discuss in this report.

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Prototype Distributed Ledger Technology of UF6 Cylinder Tracking in Ethereum

Pattengale, Nicholas D.; Farley, David R.

We have created a demonstration permissioned Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) datastore for the UF6 cylinder tracking safeguards use-case utilizing the Ethereum DLT framework and using Solidity for smart contract code. Our demonstration creates a simulated dataset representing tracking of 75,000 UF6 cylinders across 11 example nuclear facilities worldwide. Our DLT system allows for easy input and reading of shipping and receiving data, including a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Sandia’s Emulytics capability was leveraged to help create the DLT node network and assess performance. We find that our DLT prototype can easily handle to ~150,000 UF6 cylinder shipments per year worldwide, without any excessive computational or storage burden on the IAEA or Member States. Next steps could include a demonstration to the IAEA and potentially demonstrating integration with TradeLens, a DLT in use by a consortium of international shipping companies representing over half of world shipping trade.

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Results 1–25 of 39
Results 1–25 of 39