Peer to peer cluster for (ideally anonymous) threshold voting - cryptography

As an introduction to peer to peer networking and/or blockchains, I want to make a little project, but I need to know the limitations of cryptography and what combinations of features are possible. Here's what the ideal (if it were backed by a traditional server) application would feature:
A peer must be initially invited by another peer, with the exception of a seed peer.
Peers are allowed to cast a vote for another peer at a specific rate, and a vote expires either when the peer casts another vote or after a configured (as in unchangeable) TTL.
Votes are anonymous.
If a peer reaches a threshold of "alive" votes, that threshold being a portion of peers that have connected in the past 30 days, it is granted a "point," which can be cryptographically proven to be valid (as in, proven to contain a certain number of valid votes and proven to meet the threshold). At the very least peers must come to a consensus as to the validity of the votes before the point is granted.
Peers that have joined in the past are able to join the cluster without invitation, but points cannot be issued without the threshold.
Is this possible? If so, what technologies should I pursue? I took an initial look at Raft for a consensus protocol but the TTL and time based nature of the votes makes me doubtful a consensus algorithm will be more useful than a blockchain.

For time-locked crypto you can read more here:
https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/606/time-capsule-cryptography
When you understand it you will find out that you can limit things by number of calculations required only, which is somewhat a proxy for time required, and thus not guaranteed.
You will have to build a peer-to-peer system with peers competing over to "solve" a vote to their competition and thus make it invalid. Although this wont ensure fixed '30days' it can ensure almost equal time to live for all votes in the network for a certain election round.

Related

Hashgraph, what's it and how does it work?

Does anyone know what's a hashgraph and the difference from blockchain? If you could explain it to me how it works, I would be pleased!
Thank you in advance!
Hedera Hashgraph is very much different from a regular Blockchain (which is a chain of blocks as its name suggests), it is a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph).
You can read more about what a DAG is in the link provided but apart from that how Hedera is different is that it is solving the below problems that any DLT should overcome to become Scalable, Secure and Fast without losing Trust:
(1) Performance,
(2) Security,
(3) Governance,
(4) Stability,
(5) Regulatory Compliance.
How is it solving all this simultaneously without losing Trust is something that you can read more in their whitepaper which explains beautifully or refer this article from Rejolut.
One primary problem with any Public Blockchain is the TPS or Transaction per second it can handle and Hedera Hashgraph is miles ahead of the others with being able to clock 100,000 TPS which makes it valuable and preferred option as it offers services like Crypto Service, File Service, Smart Contract Service and Consensus Service.
You can have a look at some of the explorers like Kabuto and Dragonglass to get an idea of the transaction speed and other details.
If you want to play around with Hedera Hashgraph, their docs are very well written or you can use console playground to work on Smart contract and Consensus services directly and maybe use fairorder to do the account management for you to begin with.
Hedera does not use blockchain. It uses DAG, "Directed Acyclic Graph. it keeps the records of communication of all the nodes in Dag and time stamps all these messages. Sending messages between nodes is called gossiping`. Its source code is not open source.
How does the gossip protocol work
In hashgraph, when sending information between nodes, "Alice" will
choose another member at random, such as "Bob". Then Alice will tell
Bob all of the information she knows so far. Alice then repeats this
information with a different random member. Bob repeatedly does the
same, and all other members do the same. In this way, if a single
member becomes aware of new information, it will spread exponentially
fast through the community, until every member is aware of it.
The synchronization of information between two members through the
gossip protocol is called a gossip sync. Upon completion of a gossip
sync, each participating member commemorates the gossip sync with an
event. An event is stored in memory as a data structure composed of a
timestamp, an array of zero or more transactions, two parent hashes,
and a cryptographic signature. The two parent hashes are the hash of
the last event created by the self-parent prior to the gossip sync and
the hash of the last event created by the other-parent prior to the
gossip sync.
Gossiping is the basis of the hashgrap consensus algorithm which uses asynchronous byzantine fault tolerant (abft) . this indicates that there is no specific time when all the nodes reach consensus. In other words abft consensus mechanism has no block time. (there is no blockchain here. neither a block reward)
Since gossiping the fastest way of sperading information, it takes 3-5 seconds for the entire network to reach a consensus.
Hedera claims that the network achieves 10,000 HBAR cryptocurrency transactions per second. (i personally do not believe those claims)
You can also write smart contracts on Hedera. But you cannot execute 10000 smart contract operations per second because Hedera uses EVM and EVM is very slow.
Hedera has no slashing. If validators misbehave, they will not lose any of their crypto holdings. because they claim that hedera hashgraph gives validators less opportunity to misbehave. validators receive the 90% of the network fees.

ISO-8583 message processing(defining priority of messages)

I need to get an understanding of ISO-8583 message platform,lets say i want to perform a authorization of a card transaction,so in real time at a particular instance lets say i got 100000 requests from network(VISA/MASTERCARD) all for authorization,how do i define priority of there request and the response,can the connection pool handle it(in my case its HIKARI),how is it done banks/financial institutions for authorizing a request.Please provide me some insights on how to manage all these requests.Should i go for a MQ?
Tech used are:-spring boot,hibernate,spring-tcp-starter
Your question doesn't seem to be very well researched as there are a ton of switch platforms out there that due this today and many of their technology guides can be found on the web including for major vendors like ACI, FIS, AJB,.. etc if you look yard enough.
I have worked with several iso-interface specifications, commercial switches, and home grown platforms and it is actually pretty consistent in how they do the core realtime processing.
This information on prioritization is generally in each ISO-8583 message processing specification and is made explicitly clear in almost every specification I've ever read written by someone who is familar with ISO-8533 and not just making up their own variant or copying someone elses.
That said.. in general at a high level authorizations / financials (0100, 0200) requests always have high priority than force posts (0x20) messages.
Administrative messages in the 05xx and 06xx and 08xx sometimes also get bumped up above other advices.. but these are still advices and almost always auths/financials are always processed first as they A) Impact the customer B) have much tighter timers than any advice by usually more than double or more.
Most switches I have seen do it entirely in memory without going to MQ and or some other disk for core authorization process to manage these.. but not to say there is not some sort of home grown middle ware sometimes involved.. but non-realtime processes regularly use a MQ process to queue or disk queuing these up into processes not in-line of the approval for this Store-and-forward (SAF) processing.. but many of these still use memory only processing for the front of their queue.
It is important to also differentiate between 100000 requests and 100000 transactions.. the various exchanges both internal and external make a big difference in the number of actual requests/responses in flight at even given time.. a basic transaction can be accomplished in like two messages.. but some of the more complex ones can easily exceed 20 messages just for a pre-authorization or a completion component.
If you are dealing with largely batch transaction bursts.. I can see the challenge of queuing but almost every application I have seen has a max in flight for advices and requests separate of each other.. and sometimes even with different timers.. and the apps pumping the transactions almost always wait for the response back before sending more.. and this tends to work fine for just about everyone.. including big posting batches from retailers and card networks. So if your app doesn't have them.. you probably need to add them.
In fact your 100000 requests should be sorted by (Terminal ID and/or Merchant ID) + (timestamp/local timestamp) + (STAN and/or RRN).
Duplicated transaction requests expected to be rejected.
If you simulating multiple requests from single terminal (or host) with same test card details the increasing of STAN/RRN would be a case.
Please refer to previous answers about STAN and RRN ISO 8583 fields.
In ISO message, what's the use of stan and rrn ?

unable to set local description while handling race condition because of simultaneous offer exchange

I am looking for a solution where a peer sends an offer and if for some reason (may be due to network failure or the other peer is not yet started) it should rollback to stable state (with local & remote sdp set to null) so that it can handle subsequent offer messages from other peers.
Can anyone explain how to go about this?
I just faced the same issue, and I found that this problem has a name: it's called "glare".
This person answered a similar question: https://stackoverflow.com/a/29552565/1690115
But there are better solutions, based on random tokens. The idea is that peers always add a random number along their offer. When peer A and peer B notice the collision (because they each receive an offer while they have an outstanding offer), the one with the biggest token wins.
I'm not an expert on WebRCT and glare, but I hope this helped a little bit. You can find many solutions on google by searching "webrtc glare".

Cryptography: Verifying Signed Timestamps

I'm writing a peer to peer network protocol based on private/public key pair trust. To verify and deduplicate messages sent by a host, I use timestamp verification. A host does not trust another host's message if the signed timestamp has a delta (to the current) of greater than 30 seconds or so.
I just ran into the interesting problem that my test server and my second client are about 40 seconds out of sync (fixed by updating ntp).
I was wondering what an acceptable time difference would be, and if there is a better way of preventing replay attacks? Supposedly I could have one client supply a random text to hash and sign, but unfortunately this wont work as in this situation I have to write messages once.
A host does not trust another host's message if the signed timestamp has a delta (to the current) of greater than 30 seconds or so.
Time based is notoriously difficult. I can't tell you the problems I had with mobile devices that would not or could not sync their clock with the network.
Counter based is usually easier and does not DoS itself.
I was wondering what an acceptable time difference would be...
Microsoft's Active Directory uses 5 minutes.
if there is a better way of preventing replay attacks
Counter based with a challenge/response.
I could have one client supply a random text to hash and sign, but unfortunately this wont work as in this situation I have to write messages once...
Perhaps you could use a {time,nonce} pair. If the nonce has not been previously recorded, then act on the message if its within the time delta. Then hold the message (with {time,nonce}) for a windows (5 minutes?).
If you encounter the same nonce again, don't act on it. If you encounter an unseen nonce but its out of the time delta, then don't act on it. Purge your list of nonces on occasion (every 5 minutes?).
I'm writing a peer to peer network protocol based...
If you look around, then you will probably find a protocol in the academic literature.

UDP Broadcast, Multicast, or Unicast for a "Toy Application"

I'm looking to write a toy application for my own personal use (and possibly to share with friends) for peer-to-peer shared status on a local network. For instance, let's say I wanted to implement it for the name of the current building you're in (let's pretend the network topology is weird, and multiple buildings occupy the same LAN). The idea is if you run the application, you can set what building you're in, and you can see the buildings of every other user running the application on the local network.
The question is, what's the best transport/network layer technology to use to implement this?
My initial inclination was to use UDP Multicast, but the more research I do about it, the more I'm scared off by it: while the technology is great and seems easy to use, if the application is not tailored for a particular site deployment, it also seems most likely to get you a visit from an angry network admin.
I'm wondering, therefore, since this is a relatively low bandwidth application — probably max one update every 4–5 minutes or so from each client, with likely no more than 25–50 clients — whether it might be "cheaper" in many ways to use another strategy:
Multicast: find a way to pick a well-known multicast address from 239.255/16 and have interested applications join the group when they start up.
Broadcast: send out a single UDP Broadcast message every time someone's status changes (and one "refresh" broadcast when the app launches, after which every client replies directly to the requesting user with their current status).
Unicast: send a UDP Broadcast at application start to announce interest, and when a client's status changes, it sends a UDP packet directly to every client who has announced. This results in the highest traffic, but might be less likely to annoy other systems with needless broadcast packets. It also introduces potential complications when apps crash (in terms of generating unnecessary traffic).
Multicast is most certainly the best technology for the job, but I'm wondering if the associated hassles are worth avoiding since this is just a "toy application," not a business-critical service intended for professional network admin deployment and configuration.