Blockchain

Blockchain can prevent illegal nuclear trade?

Harvard College scientist believes that blockchain technology is a perfect way to control nuclear export
22 October 2017   1438

As Aaron Arnold, A Harvard Kennedy School researcher and an associate of the Project on Managing the Atom, states in his writing "Blockchain: A new aid to nuclear export controls?" there is a huge problem of unclear sanctions towards international nuclear trade, export and supplies which can be resolved by blockchain. 

He presumes that blockchain technology of smart contracts can be very useful for audit and to create well-protected, international logistical orders regarding nuclear resources and to protect them from unauthorized access.

Coalitions, like the Nuclear Suppliers Group, should start thinking now about blockchain and its implications for supply-side controls. This includes developing a firm understanding of the relationships between public and private sector implementations of blockchain, and the consequences for controlling nuclear and dual-use goods and technologies.
 

Aaron Arnold

Researcher, Harvard Kennedy School 

In future, blockchain technology can become a perfect solution to the issue of falsification and a source of preventing fraud as there will be no difficulty to trace the source of nuclear supplies.

EthereumBlockchain

Potentional Vulnerabilities Found in ETH 2.0

Least Authority have found potentional security issues in the network P2P interaction and block proposal system
26 March 2020   964

Technology security firm Least Authority, at the request of the Ethereum Foundation, conducted an audit of the Ethereum 2.0 specifications and identified several potential vulnerabilities at once.

Least Authority said that developers need to solve problems with vulnerabilities in the network layer of peer-to-peer (P2P) interaction, as well as in the block proposal system. At the same time, the auditor noted that the specifications are "very well thought out and competent."

However, at the moment there is no large ecosystem based on PoS and using sharding in the world, so it is impossible to accurately assess the prospects for system stability.
Also, information security experts emphasized that the specifications did not pay enough attention to the description of the P2P network level and the system of records about Ethereum nodes. Vulnerability risks are also observed in the block proposal system and the messaging system between nodes.

Experts said that in the blockchains running on PoS, the choice of a new block is simple and no one can predict who will get the new block. In PoS systems, it is the block proposal system that decides whose block will fall into the blockchain, and this leads to the risk of data leakage. To solve the problem, auditors suggested using the mechanism of "Single Secret Leader Election" (SSLE).

As for the peer-to-peer exchange system, there is a danger of spam. There is no centralized node in the system that would evaluate the actions of other nodes, so a “malicious" node can spam the entire network with various messages without any special punishment. The solution to this problem may be to use special protocols for exchanging messages between nodes.