Epistemology of “Natural Religion” by D. Hume: Hidden Paradoxes

The article examines the paradoxes of the concept of “natural religion” by D. Hume, which arose as a result of his application of the method of radical skepticism to the subjects of religious faith. It is shown that the analysis of D. Hume is a movement from the original theses of a skeptical nature – to theses that coincide with traditional views. The main paradox of his concept is that the impossibility of rational proofs of knowledge of anything (including knowledge of the existence of God) leads to the fact that the basic epistemological category of D. Hume is the category of faith (belief). This, in turn, leads to the disappearance of fundamental differences between what is commonly called “positive” (scientific) knowledge and religious faith. Moreover, in this case, it is religious faith that turns out to be a kind of “model” of any knowledge as such. The merit of D. Hume in clarifying this question is that he clearly pointed out the illegality of separating the representation from the judgment and conclusion in acts of knowledge – and returning reflection to their primary unity in the real experience of consciousness.

Mesh: A Supply Chain Solution with Locally Private Blockchain Transactions

A major line of research on blockchains is geared towards enhancing the privacy of transactions through anonymity using generic non-interactive proofs. However, there is a good cluster of application scenarios where complete anonymity is not desirable and accountability is in fact required. In this work, we utilize non-interactive proofs of knowledge of elliptic curve discrete logarithms to present membership and verifiable encryption proof, which offers plausible anonymity when combined with the regular signing process of the blockchain transactions. The proof system requires no trusted setup, both its communication and computation complexities are linear in the number of set members, and its security relies on the discrete logarithm assumption. As a use-case for this scenario, we present Mesh which is a blockchain-based framework for supply chain management using RFIDs. Finally, the confidentiality of the transacted information is realized using a lightweight key chaining mechanism implemented on RFIDs. We formally define and prove the main security features of the protocol, and report on experiments for evaluating the performance of the modified transactions for this system.

Black-Box Accumulation: Collecting Incentives in a Privacy-Preserving Way

We formalize and construct black-box accumulation (BBA), a useful building block for numerous important user-centric protocols including loyalty systems, refund systems, and incentive systems (as, e.g., employed in participatory sensing and vehicle-to-grid scenarios). A core requirement all these systems share is a mechanism to let users collect and sum up values (call it incentives, bonus points, reputation points, etc.) issued by some other parties in a privacy-preserving way such that curious operators may not be able to link the different transactions of a user. At the same time, a group of malicious users may not be able to cheat the system by pretending to have collected a higher amount than what was actually issued to them. As a first contribution, we fully formalize the core functionality and properties of this important building block. Furthermore, we present a generic and non-interactive construction of a BBA system based on homomorphic commitments, digital signatures, and non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge. For our construction, we formally prove security and privacy properties. Finally, we propose a concrete instantiation of our construction using Groth-Sahai commitments and proofs as well as the optimal structure-preserving signature scheme of Abe et al. and analyze its efficiency.