Dusk Network Development Update — January

A monthly development update series created to embrace the transparency and inclusivity that we strive for at Dusk Network.

Development

It’s that time of the month again! A near-complete state of the reference implementation implies that we have now officially entered the “tightening nuts and bolts” phase of the development. For those unfamiliar with the process, this means thoroughly auditing and refactoring the code as well as ascertaining that the modules function in unison as anticipated.

In the meantime, we have been generalising our Bulletproof protocol from range proofs to arbitrary circuits. Bulletproofs enable the prover to produce a zero-knowledge proof for a NP (nondeterministic polynomial time) problem, which, in the layman terms, means that any decision problem with a polynomial-time proof can be proven in Bulletproof. While the majority of current Bulletproof uses revolve around range proofs, meaning that the prover can prove that a certain integer is in a predefined range without revealing the integer itself, numerous use cases in Dusk Network require the use of Bulletproofs to generate zero-knowledge proofs for other problem types. Set inclusion proofs, hash pre-image proofs and Merkle Tree path proofs, among other types of problems.

Matteo Ferretti (former Mozilla), our latest addition to the core team and Virtual Machine (VM) Lead, has been putting in long hours into the development of a Turing-complete VM, the backbone of the smart contract-enabled platform.

Research

In the works since early December, the team has conceptually finalized the overhauled version of SBA★. One of the goals of the upgrade was to maintain the original security assumptions while simultaneously reducing the number of committee members, which results in a more scalable protocol. The upgraded protocol deprecates the idea of using default (empty) blocks when the participants fail to reach a consensus on a single candidate block. Instead, we repeat the block generation process until the probability of an attacker winning all the generator lotteries becomes negligible.

The team has been researching the possibility of using zero-knowledge proofs of set inclusion as a space-efficient substitute to ring signatures. The previous update mentioned the research into the use of pairing-friendly cryptographic primitives for the ring signatures, however, we are confident that set inclusion proofs would be a better fit, both from a space and computational cost perspective. As far as we are concerned, this scheme has never been proposed before.

Community

Earlier in January, we have published our an End of the Sale announcement, detailing the results of the token sale and our plans going forward.

Emanuele Francioni, Tech Lead, and Jelle Pol, Business Lead, share the details of the project with Boxmining while Pascal Putman, our Business and Project manager, was interviewed by stoupdates.

How to learn more about Dusk Network

The Dusk Network is a project coordinated by the Dusk Foundation. We are a decentralized ecosystem entirely focused on providing the perfect trade-off between privacy and transparency. Dusk protects privacy and fits regulations in payments, communications and asset transfers.

Website: https://www.dusk.network

FAQ: https://www.dusk.network/faq

Telegram: https://t.me/dusknetwork

Twitter: https://twitter.com/duskfoundation

Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/dusknetwork

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/duskfoundation/

GitHub: https://github.com/dusk-network