Peer-to-peer Autonomous Agent Communication Network

Lokman Rahmani, David Minarsch, Jonathan Ward

Reliable and secure communication between heterogeneously resourced autonomous agents controlled by competing stakeholders in a decentralized environment is a challenge. Agents require a means to find each other and communicate without reliance on a centralized party and participation in the system must be permissionless.

Trading Agent Competition with Autonomous Economic Agents

David Minarsch, Seyed Ali Hosseini, Marco Favorito, and Jonathan Ward

We provide a case study for the Autonomous Economic Agent (AEA) framework; a toolkit for the development and deployment of autonomous agents with a focus on economic activities. The use case is the trading agent competition (TAC). It is a competition between autonomous agents with customizable strategies and market parameters.

Autonomous Economic Agents as a Second Layer Technology for Blockchains

David Minarsch, Seyed Ali Hosseini, Marco Favorito, and Jonathan Ward

The user experience of interacting with distributed ledger technologies (DLT) is fraught with excessive complexity, high risk and unintuitive processes. Moreover, smart contracts deployed in these systems are restricted to being reactive.

Fully Distributed Verifiable Random Functions and their Application to Decentralised Random Beacons

David Galindo, Jia Liu, Mihai Ordean and Jin-Mann Wong

We provide a systematic analysis of two multiparty protocols, namely Distributed Verifiable Random Functions (DVRFs) and Decentralised Random Beacons (DRBs), including their syntax and definition of robustness and privacy properties.

Robust Subgroup Multi-Signatures for Consensus

David Galindo and Jia Liu

We introduce a new multi-signature variant called robust subgroup multi-signatures, whereby any eligible subgroup of signers from the global set can produce a multi-signature on behalf of the group, even in the presence of a byzantine adversary. We propose several constructions that improve multi-signature computation time.

An Offline Delegatable Cryptocurrency System

Rujia Li, Qin Wang, Xinrui Zhang, Qi Wang, David Galindo and Yang Xiang

We propose DelegaCoin, an offline delegatable cryptocurrency system that uses trusted execution environments (TEEs) as decentralized "virtual agents" to prevent malicious delegation. In DelegaCoin, an owner can delegate his coins through offline-transactions without interacting with the blockchain network.

A Practical Framework for General Dialogue-based Bilateral Interactions

Seyed Ali Hosseini, David Minarsch, Marco Favorito

For autonomous agents and services to cooperate and interact in multiagent environments they require well-defined protocols. A multitude of protocol languages for multi-agent systems have been proposed in the past, but they have mostly remained theoretical or have limited prototypical implementations.

Symbolic modelling of remote attestation protocols for device and app integrity on Android

Abdulla Aldoseri, Tom Chothia, José Moreira, David F. Oswald

Ensuring the integrity of a remote app or device is one of the most challenging concerns for the Android ecosystem. Software-based solutions provide limited protection and can usually be circumvented by repacking the mobile app or rooting the device.

Automatic verification of transparency protocols

Vincent Cheval, José Moreira, Mark Ryan

Transparency protocols are protocols whose actions can be publicly monitored by observers (such observers may include regulators, rights advocacy groups, or the general public). The observed actions are typically usages of private keys such as decryptions, and signings.

Protocols for a Two-Tiered Trusted Computing Base

José Moreira, Mark Ryan, Flavio D. Garcia

A trusted computing base (TCB) is the minimum set of hardware and software components which are inherently trusted by a platform, and upon which more complex secure services can be built. The TCB is secure by definition, and it is typically implemented through hardened hardware components, which ensure that their secret data cannot be compromised.

Transparent Registration-Based Encryption through Blockchain

Qin Wang, Rujia Li, Qi Wang, David Galindo, Shiping Chen, Yang Xiang

Garg et al. (TCC 2018) defined the notion of registration-based encryption (RBE) where the private key generator (PKG) is decoupled from key management and replaced by a key curator (KC). KC does not possess any cryptographic secrets and only plays the role of aggregating the public keys of all the registered users and updating the public parameters whenever a new user joins the system, which solves the key escrow issue.

SoK: TEE-Assisted Confidential Smart Contract

Rujia Li, Qin Wang, Qi Wang, David Galindo, Mark Ryan

The blockchain-based smart contract lacks privacy, since the contract state and instruction code are exposed to the public. Combining smart-contract execution with Trusted Execution Environments provides an efficient solution, called TEE-assisted smart contracts (TCSC), for protecting the confidentiality of contract states.

Robust Subgroup Multi-Signatures for Consensus

David Galindo, Jia Liu

Multi-signatures are used to attest that a given collection of n parties, indexed by their respective public keys, have all signed a given message. A recent popular application of multi-signatures is to be found in consensus protocols to attest that a qualified subset of a global set of n validators have reached agreement.