We present a single-database computationally private information retrieval scheme with polylogarithmic communication complexity. Our construction is based on a new, but reasonable intractability assumption, which we call the Φ-Hiding Assumption (ΦHA): essentially the difficulty of deciding whether a small prime divides φ(m), where m is a composite integer of unknown factorization.

Fabric is a modular and extensible open-source system for deploying and operating permissioned blockchains and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by the Linux Foundation (www.hyperledger.org). Fabric is the first truly extensible blockchain system for running distributed applications. It supports modular consensus protocols, which allows the system to be tailored to particular use cases and trust models. Fabric is also the first blockchain system that runs distributed applications written in standard, general-purpose programming languages, without systemic dependency on a native cryptocurrency. This stands in sharp contrast to existing blockchain platforms that require "smart-contracts" to be written in domain-specific languages or rely on a cryptocurrency. Fabric realizes the permissioned model using a portable notion of membership, which may be integrated with industry-standard identity management. To support such flexibility, Fabric introduces an entirely novel blockchain design and revamps the way blockchains cope with nondeterminism, resource exhaustion, and performance attacks. This paper describes Fabric, its architecture, the rationale behind various design decisions, its most prominent implementation aspects, as well as its distributed application programming model. We further evaluate Fabric by implementing and benchmarking a Bitcoin-inspired digital currency. We show that Fabric achieves end-to-end throughput of more than 3500 transactions per second in certain popular deployment configurations, with sub-second latency, scaling well to over 100 peers.

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Byzantine agreement requires a set of parties in a distributed system to agree on a value even if some parties are maliciously misbehaving. A new protocol for Byzantine agreement in a completely asynchronous network is presented that makes use of new cryptographic protocols, specifically protocols for threshold signatures and coin-tossing. These cryptographic protocols have practical and provably secure implementations in the random oracle model. In particular, a coin-tossing protocol based on the Diffie-Hellman problem is presented and analyzed.The resulting asynchronous Byzantine agreement protocol is both practical and theoretically optimal because it tolerates the maximum number of corrupted parties, runs in constant expected rounds, has message and communication complexity close to the optimum, and uses a trusted dealer only once in a setup phase, after which it can process a virtually unlimited number of transactions.