Blockchain-Based Auditing of Transparent Log Servers

摘要

Public key server is a simple yet effective way of key management in secure end-to-end communication. To ensure the trustworthiness of a public key server, CONIKS employs a tamper-evident data structure on the server and a gossiping protocol among clients in order to detect compromised servers. However, due to lack of incentive and vulnerability to malicious clients, a gossiping protocol is hard to implement in practice. Meanwhile, alternative solutions such as EthIKS are too costly. This paper presents Trusternity, an auditing scheme relying on Ethereum blockchain that is easy to implement, inexpensive to operate and resilient to malicious clients. We also conduct an empirical study of system behaviour in face of attacks and propose a lightweight anomaly detection algorithm to protect clients against such attacks.