KORGAN: An Efficient PKI Architecture Based on PBFT Through Dynamic Threshold Signatures

During the past decade, several misbehaving certificate authorities (CAs) have issued fraudulent TLS certificates allowing man-in-the-middle (MITM) kinds of attacks that result in serious security incidents. In order to avoid such incidents, Yakubov et al. ((2018) A blockchain-based PKI management framework. NOMS 2018 - 2018 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium, Taipei, Taiwan, April, pp. 16. IEEE) recently proposed a new public key infrastructure (PKI) architecture where CAs issue, revoke and validate X.509 certificates on a public blockchain. However, in their proposal TLS clients are subject to MITM kinds of attacks, and certificate transparency is not fully provided. In this paper, we eliminate the issues of the Yakubov et al.’s scheme and propose a new PKI architecture based on permissioned blockchain with PBFT consensus mechanism where the consensus nodes utilize a dynamic threshold signature scheme to generate signed blocks. In this way, the trust to the intermediary entities can be completely eliminated during certificate validation. Our scheme enjoys the dynamic property of the threshold signature because TLS clients do not have to change the verification key even if the validator set is dynamic. We implement our proposal on private Ethereum network to demonstrate the experimental results. The results show that our proposal has negligible overhead during TLS handshake. The certificate validation duration is less than the duration in the conventional PKI and Yakubov et al.’s scheme.

An Introduction to Development-led Archaeology in Europe: Meeting the needs of archaeologists, developers and the public

In the EAC 2018 heritage management symposium, the idea was to look at the topic of development-led archaeology from a different angle and encourage discussions between heritage management officials, developers, archaeologists working in the field and the public. How can we meet the needs of these very different stakeholders and do we always need to? This topic was also highly relevant in view of the decision of the EU and European Parliament’s decision to make 2018 the European Year of Cultural Heritage with the aim of raising awareness as well as drawing attention to the opportunities offered by Cultural Heritage i.e. to reflect on the place that cultural heritage occupies in our lives. This themed issue reflects some of the topics covered by speakers from professional archaeology and cultural heritage spheres as well as representatives of the media and the general public.