Some time have passed since my last post, mainly because I was working on two papers. One is MAVE (Digital Signature Protocol for Massive bulk verifications) and the other is HBOW (an application of MAVE to peer-to-peer currencies).

What is special in MAVE is that it does not use classical digital signature algorithms (e.g. asymmetric) to achieve digital signatures, but relies on commitments. The tricky part is preventing man-in-the middle attacks that delay those commitments. Please note that for MAVE to be used as the digital signature part of a cryptocurrency, some other problems have to be solved, because MAVE signatures can be forged if an attacker gains more than 51% of the network hashing power. This is not an issue in Bitcoin. I found that you can establish an assurance on transactions (how much money you withstand to lose if someone is able to get the 51% ), and by freezing the block chain once some blocks have past. The freezing time could be one day (the drawback is that if the network is split for more than a day, then the networks will never rejoin). All those issues are treated in the HBOW paper, which I plan to publish in the following weeks. I’d like to point out the MAVE/HBOW is not intended to be a Bitcoin replacement: I think that the best protocol would be an hybrid between these.

Now is time that I publish MAVE and receive feedback. Today I’ll publish a preliminary version of MAVE. Please e-mail me for suggestion, comments or to point out mistakes.

MAVE: new lightweight digital signature protocols for massive verifications