Downtime Required for Bitcoin Quantum-Safety

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16965v1
• Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2024 12:47:10 GMT
• Title: Downtime Required for Bitcoin Quantum-Safety
• Authors: Jamie J. Pont, Joseph J. Kearney, Jack Moyler, Carlos A. Perez-Delgado,
• Abstract summary: Quantum devices capable of breaking the public-key cryptosystems that Bitcoin relies on to secure its transactions are expected with reasonable probability within a decade. Quantum attacks would put at risk the entire Bitcoin network, which has an estimated value of around 500 billion USD. The only known way to prevent any such attack is to upgrade the currently used public-key cryptosystems, namely ECDSA.
• Score: 0.0
• License:
• Abstract: Quantum devices capable of breaking the public-key cryptosystems that Bitcoin relies on to secure its transactions are expected with reasonable probability within a decade. Quantum attacks would put at risk the entire Bitcoin network, which has an estimated value of around 500 billion USD. To prevent this threat, a proactive approach is critical. The only known way to prevent any such attack is to upgrade the currently used public-key cryptosystems, namely ECDSA, with so-called post-quantum cryptosystems which have no known vulnerabilities to quantum attacks. In this paper, we analyse the technical cost of such an upgrade. We calculate a non-tight lower bound on the cumulative downtime required for the above transition to be 1827.96 hours, or 76.16 days. We also demonstrate that the transition needs to be fully completed before the availability of ECDSA-256 breaking quantum devices, in order to ensure Bitcoin's ongoing security. The conclusion is that the Bitcoin upgrade to quantum-safe protocols needs to be started as soon as possible in order to guarantee its ongoing operations.

Related papers

• On the practicality of quantum sieving algorithms for the shortest vector problem [42.70026220176376]
  lattice-based cryptography is one of the main candidates of post-quantum cryptography. cryptographic security against quantum attackers is based on lattice problems like the shortest vector problem (SVP) Asymptotic quantum speedups for solving SVP are known and rely on Grover's search.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-17T16:54:41Z)
• The Latency Price of Threshold Cryptosystem in Blockchains [52.359230560289745]
  We study the interplay between threshold cryptography and a class of blockchains that use Byzantine-fault tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols. Existing approaches for threshold cryptosystems introduce a latency overhead of at least one message delay for running the threshold cryptographic protocol. We propose a mechanism to eliminate this overhead for blockchain-native threshold cryptosystems with tight thresholds.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-07-16T20:53:04Z)
• Simple Tests of Quantumness Also Certify Qubits [69.96668065491183]
  A test of quantumness is a protocol that allows a classical verifier to certify (only) that a prover is not classical. We show that tests of quantumness that follow a certain template, which captures recent proposals such as (Kalai et al., 2022) can in fact do much more. Namely, the same protocols can be used for certifying a qubit, a building-block that stands at the heart of applications such as certifiable randomness and classical delegation of quantum computation.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-03-02T14:18:17Z)
• When Quantum Information Technologies Meet Blockchain in Web 3.0 [86.91054991998273]
  We introduce a quantum blockchain-driven Web 3.0 framework that provides information-theoretic security for decentralized data transferring and payment transactions. We discuss the potential applications and challenges of implementing quantum blockchain in Web 3.0.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-11-29T05:38:42Z)
• Quantum Prudent Contracts with Applications to Bitcoin [0.38073142980733]
  We show how to implement prudent contracts -- a non-trivial subset of the functionality that a network such as Bitcoin provides. Our one-shot signature construction can be used to upgrade the Bitcoin network to a quantum payment scheme. Our approach requires a universal large-scale quantum computer and long-term quantum memory.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-04-27T09:48:35Z)
• Quantum-resistance in blockchain networks [46.63333997460008]
  This paper describes the work carried out by the Inter-American Development Bank, the IDB Lab, LACChain, Quantum Computing (CQC), and Tecnologico de Monterrey to identify and eliminate quantum threats in blockchain networks. The advent of quantum computing threatens internet protocols and blockchain networks because they utilize non-quantum resistant cryptographic algorithms.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-06-11T23:39:25Z)
• Quantum Advantage on Proof of Work [0.0]
  We make the case that quantum devices provide a computational advantage in performing Proof-of-Work (PoW) in the context of Bitcoin. This has strong consequences regarding both quantum-based attacks on the integrity of the entirety of the blockchain, as well as more legitimate uses of quantum computation for the purpose of mining Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-05-05T01:27:31Z)
• Vulnerability of Blockchain Technologies to Quantum Attacks [0.0]
  Quantum computation represents a threat to many cryptographic protocols in operation today. It has been estimated that by 2035, there will exist a quantum computer capable of breaking the vital cryptographic scheme RSA2048.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-05-05T01:01:42Z)
• Quantum Multi-Solution Bernoulli Search with Applications to Bitcoin's Post-Quantum Security [67.06003361150228]
  A proof of work (PoW) is an important cryptographic construct enabling a party to convince others that they invested some effort in solving a computational task. In this work, we examine the hardness of finding such chain of PoWs against quantum strategies. We prove that the chain of PoWs problem reduces to a problem we call multi-solution Bernoulli search, for which we establish its quantum query complexity.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-12-30T18:03:56Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.