TY - JOUR
T1 - Impossibility of finding any third family of server protocols integrating byzantine quorum systems with threshold signature schemes
AU - Lin, Jingqiang
AU - Liu, Peng
AU - Jing, Jiwu
AU - Wang, Qiongxiao
PY - 2013/5
Y1 - 2013/5
N2 - To tolerate servers' Byzantine failures, a distributed storage service of self-verifying data needs to make three security properties be Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT): data consistency, data availability, and confidentiality of the signing service's private key. Building such systems demands the integration of Byzantine quorum systems (BQSs), which only make data consistency and availability be BFT, and threshold signature schemes (TSSs), which only make confidentiality of the private key be BFT. Two families of valid TSS-BQS systems (of which the server protocols carry all the design options) have been proposed in the literature. Motivated by the failures in finding a third family of valid server protocols, we study the reverse problem and formally prove that it is impossible to find any third family of valid TSS-BQS systems. To obtain this proof, we develop a validity theory on server protocols of TSS-BQS systems. It is shown that the only two families of valid server protocols, "predicted" (or deduced) by the validity theory, precisely match the existing protocols.
AB - To tolerate servers' Byzantine failures, a distributed storage service of self-verifying data needs to make three security properties be Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT): data consistency, data availability, and confidentiality of the signing service's private key. Building such systems demands the integration of Byzantine quorum systems (BQSs), which only make data consistency and availability be BFT, and threshold signature schemes (TSSs), which only make confidentiality of the private key be BFT. Two families of valid TSS-BQS systems (of which the server protocols carry all the design options) have been proposed in the literature. Motivated by the failures in finding a third family of valid server protocols, we study the reverse problem and formally prove that it is impossible to find any third family of valid TSS-BQS systems. To obtain this proof, we develop a validity theory on server protocols of TSS-BQS systems. It is shown that the only two families of valid server protocols, "predicted" (or deduced) by the validity theory, precisely match the existing protocols.
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U2 - 10.1002/sec.593
DO - 10.1002/sec.593
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84876328102
VL - 6
SP - 612
EP - 630
JO - Security and Communication Networks
JF - Security and Communication Networks
SN - 1939-0122
IS - 5
ER -