TWC: Small: Addressing the challenges of cryptocurrencies: Security, anonymity, stability

安全的数字支付对电子商务和网络安全至关重要。加密货币是使用密码学原理设计的虚拟货币，非常适合数字支付，但在合法电子商务中采用加密货币面临几个障碍。障碍包括：(1)较差的软件安全性导致非常高的盗窃率和服务关闭率，(2)用户可能被去匿名化，否定了假定的隐私利益，以及(3)由于用于激励参与者的机制的固有缺陷或由于对手破坏该机制的能力，存在对长期稳定性的担忧。该项目设计并实现了对可立即增量部署的现有加密货币的安全性和匿名性改进，并开发了一个框架来分析加密货币参与者的行为。该框架将用于理解和预测当前系统的行为，以及探索替代方案，更具弹性的设计。加密货币研究面临的主要挑战是，这些系统依赖于三个主要组成部分的复杂相互作用：密码学、分布式系统和激励驱动行为。因此，该项目开发了所有这三个类别的工具和技术，并寻求找到统一和应用这些工具的新方法。该项目的成功完成将导致一种对对手强大的加密货币，为安全，私人和稳定的支付系统铺平道路，这一直是计算机科学的研究目标。

Secure digital payments are essential for e-commerce and cybersecurity. Cryptocurrencies, which are virtual currencies designed using cryptographic principles, are well suited for digital payments but face several hurdles to adoption for legitimate e-commerce. The hurdles include (1) poor software security that has led to very high rates of theft and closures of services, (2) users may be deanonymized, negating the putative privacy benefits and (3) there are concerns over long-term stability, either due to inherent flaws in the mechanism used to incentivize participants or due to the ability of adversaries to subvert this mechanism.This project designs and implements security and anonymity improvements for existing cryptocurrencies that are immediately and incrementally deployable, and develops a framework to analyze the behavior of participants of cryptocurrencies. This framework will be used both to understand and predict the behavior of the current system as well as to explore alternative, more resilient designs. The main challenge for research on cryptocurrencies is that these systems rely on an intricate interplay of three main components: cryptography, distributed systems, and incentive driven behavior. Accordingly, the project develops tools and techniques in all three categories and seek to find novel ways to unify and apply these tools in combination. Successful completion of the project will lead to a cryptocurrency that is robust against adversaries, paving the way for a secure, private, and stable payment system, which has long been a research goal in computer science.