Research Pulse #34 is out!
Blockchain sharding is one of the most highly anticipated scalability solutions under development. While the team behind Ethereum 2.0 often leads the charge when it comes to this technology, there are several teams actively pursuing a shared architecture. On the Security and Performance of Blockchain Sharding provides a comprehensive overview of the current status quo and sheds light on the pros and cons of existing approaches to a sharded architecture.
In The Exact Security of BIP32 Wallets, the authors provide an evaluation of crypto’s most widely-used custody protocol: BIP32. This standard enables the creation of so-called Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) wallets which enable users of various cryptoassets to back up their wallets using a single key. Beyond providing the first thorough evaluation of the security of BIP32, this work proposes a modification to the standard that adds additional 20 bits of security at no additional cost.
Finally, in SoK: How private is Bitcoin? Classification and Evaluation of Bitcoin Mixing Techniques, the authors evaluate the strength of Bitcoin’s pseudonymity when users employ mixing techniques. Such techniques are intended to increase the privacy of users by combining their funds into a single transaction. In doing so, third parties observing the blockchain would need to perform substantially more work in order to track individual senders and receivers.