Equilibrium Concepts for Rational Multiparty Computation

Wallrabenstein, John Ross; Clifton, Chris

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-02786-9_14

Cited by 9 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Even with everyone following the protocol (i.e., honest behavior), existing methods of allocating block rewards lead to poor equitability, as does the initialization of systems with small stake pools and/or large rewards relative to the stake pool. Consensus in distributed computing with weighted nodes and more general notions of fairness are studied in [6], [83], [182]. [147] extend this notion to environments with adaptive corruption by strengthening the definition of "ideal protocol quality" defined in [78] and [146].…”

Section: Fairnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

PREStO: A Systematic Framework for Blockchain Consensus Protocols

Leonardos

Reijsbergen

Piliouras

2020

IEEE Trans. Eng. Manage.

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The rapid evolution of the blockchain community has brought together stakeholders from fundamentally different backgrounds: cryptographers, protocol designers, software developers, startup entrepreneurs, corporate executives and investors, academics of various disciplines, and end users. The result is a diverse ecosystem, presently exemplified by the development of a wide range of different blockchain protocols. This raises questions for policy and decision makers: How do different protocols compare? What are their trade-offs? Existing efforts to survey the area reveal a fragmented terminology, and the lack of a unified framework to make the different desirable properties of blockchain protocols explicit.In this paper, we work towards bridging this gap. We evaluate protocols within a five-dimensional design space with the following axes. Optimality: does the protocol achieve its main goals? Stability: are the incentives of its participating agents well-aligned? Efficiency: is its output maximal relative to its use of resources? Robustness: can it cope when its operational assumptions are invalid or perturbed? Persistence: can it recover from catastrophic events? Based on the relevant literature, we organize the properties of existing protocols in subcategories of increasing granularity. The result is a dynamic scheme -termed the PREStO framework. Its scope is to aid the communication between stakeholders of different backgrounds, including managers and investors, and to identify research challenges and opportunities for blockchain protocols in a systematic way. We illustrate this via use cases and make a first step to understand the blockchain ecosystem through a more comprehensive lens.

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Section: Fairnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

PREStO: A Systematic Framework for Blockchain Consensus Protocols

Leonardos

Reijsbergen

Piliouras

2020

IEEE Trans. Eng. Manage.

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“…Previous works on the general topic of rational multi-party protocols include [5,24,29,58,71] while a related line of research explored cheap talk [4,32,51,70]. For example cheap talk [23,27] was used in [4] for simulating an honest mediator given (i) secure private channels between agents that incur no cost, (ii) a punishment strategy such as having the participants stop the protocol if misbehaviour is detected.…”

Section: Other Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coalition-Safe Equilibria with Virtual Payoffs

Kiayias¹,

Stouka²

2020

Preprint

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Consider a set of parties invited to execute a protocol Π. The protocol will incur some cost to run while in the end (or at regular intervals), it will populate and update local tables that assign (virtual) rewards to participants. Each participant aspires to offset the costs of participation by these virtual payoffs that are provided in the course of the protocol. In this setting, we introduce and study a notion of coalition-safe equilibrium. In particular, we consider a strategic coalition of participants that is centrally coordinated and potentially deviates from Π with the objective to increase its utility with respect to the view of at least one of the other participants. The protocol Π is called a coalition-safe equilibrium with virtual payoffs (EVP) if no such protocol deviation exists. We apply our notion to study incentives in blockchain protocols. Compared to prior work, our framework has the advantages that it simultaneously (i) takes into account that each participant may have a divergent view of the rewards given to the other participants, as the reward mechanism employed is subject to consensus among players (and our notion is well defined independently of whether the underlying protocol achieves consensus or not) (ii) accounts for the stochastic nature of these protocols enforcing the equilibrium condition to hold with overwhelming probability (iii) provides a versatile way to describe a wide variety of utility functions that are based on rewards recorded in the ledger and cost incurred during ledger maintenance. We proceed to use our framework to provide a unified picture of incentives in the Bitcoin blockchain, for absolute and relative rewards based utility functions, as well as prove novel results regarding incentives of the Fruitchain blockchain protocol [PODC 2017] showing that the equilibrium condition holds for collusions up to n − 1 players for absolute rewards based utility functions and less than n/2 for relative rewards based utility functions, with the latter result holding for any "weakly fair" blockchain protocol, a new property that we introduce and may be of independent interest.

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“…The notion of covertness suggests the rational decision process of agents. There are prior studies on the use of game-theoretic construction for rational Secure MPC and rational secret sharing [25,26]. In rational Secure MPC, each party has his/her own secret held in "hostage" by other peer parties and the goal is to encourage players to exchange shares so that all parties benefit from knowing the final answers.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

On privacy preference in collusion-deterrence games for secure multi-party computation

Wang

Cheung

2016

2016 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

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Secure multi-party computation (MPC) has been established as the de facto paradigm for protecting privacy in distributed computation. Information-theoretic secure MPC protocols, though more efficient than their computationally secure counterparts, require at least three computational parties and are prone to collusion attacks. Previous work has used mechanism designs to deter collusion. An important element missing is the consideration of how different players value privacy. In this paper, we provide a detailed analysis of possible outcomes under different privacy preferences based on the relative cost of collusion attacks over loss of privacy. We explicitly calculate the conditions under which honesty is the solution. Simulation results provide further evidence to demonstrate the validity of our mechanism design.

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Equilibrium Concepts for Rational Multiparty Computation

Cited by 9 publications

References 25 publications

PREStO: A Systematic Framework for Blockchain Consensus Protocols

PREStO: A Systematic Framework for Blockchain Consensus Protocols

Coalition-Safe Equilibria with Virtual Payoffs

On privacy preference in collusion-deterrence games for secure multi-party computation

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