Consumer behavior is changing with an increase in e-mobility and on demand services. People are now willing to share data and use more technology which is accelerating a digital experience in everything we do. Ride sharing is becoming more popular among urban riders. Not only is it eco-friendly but also great to cut down expenses. This also comes with many unforeseen risks. Use of blockchain technology can help reduce these risks very accurately and help create a safer and more sustainable environment for all.

A friend told me about Concordium and how regulation can be a good thing. It got me wondering. Using blockchains like Concordium which are designed to bring 'Blockchain to Business' can help greatly reduce the risks, since it has regulatory compliance by design. It can make sure that the co-passengers sharing the ride with you do not have any criminal background without actually putting their privacy at risk by revealing too much information to the other passengers too which would reduce any malicious actions by other co-passengers that they might take to advantage incase too much information is revealed.

It even has a verification feature both on chain and off chain, at the same time maintaining privacy of all, ( basically using ( Zero Knowledge Proofs to privately verify information ) so you can safely share rides with people you don't know.

Using blockchain can help track many things like the the usage times and share vehicle data to owners, manufacturers in a safe and secure way without being tampered with.

Can help link data held by different businesses across industries, can enable “pay as you go mechanisms” and help both consumers and retailers help boost businesses especially in a time where economies these days are hit by the Covid19 pandemic.

There are many more applications I was thinking of. How else is blockchain being used in the Automotive industry? Are there any cryptos in particular catering to the automotive industry?

Automotive industry is a very big sector that can generate billions in revenue if done correctly.

In the wake of GDPR and other privacy laws, companies need ways to process data in a way such that the trust is distributed among several parties. This is super important for preservation of privacy as well as being compliant with the laws.

Topology-Hiding Computation (THC) allows a set of parties to securely compute a function over an incomplete network without revealing information on the network topology. Since its introduction in TCC’15 by Moran et al., the research on THC has focused on reducing the communication complexity, allowing larger graph classes, and tolerating stronger corruption types.

All of these results consider a fully synchronous model with a known upper bound on the maximal delay of all communication channels.

Unfortunately, in any realistic setting this bound has to be extremely large, which makes all fully synchronous protocols inefficient. In the literature on multi- party computation, this is solved by considering the fully asynchronous model.

However, THC is unachievable in this model (and even hard to define), leaving even the definition of a meaningful model as an open problem.

Researchers from Concordium, MIT, IDC Herzilya and ETH Zurich introduce a meaningful model of unknown and random communication delays for which THC is both definable and achievable.

The probability distributions of the delays can be arbitrary for each channel, but one needs to make the (necessary) assumption that the delays are independent.

The existing fully-synchronous THC protocols do not work in this setting and would, in particular, leak information about the topology.

Second, in the model with trusted stateless hardware boxes introduced at Eurocrypt’18 by Ball et al., the researchers present a THC protocol that works for any graph class.

Third, they explore what is achievable in the standard model without trusted hardware and present a THC protocol for specific graph types (cycles and trees) secure under the DDH assumption.

The speed of all protocols scales with the actual (unknown) delay times, in contrast to all previously known THC protocols whose speed is determined by the assumed upper bound on the network delay.

A fundamental solution to this problem is to introduce a meaningful model to secure multiparty computation.

I found a research paper that basically speaks about creating the simplest multi-key linearly Homomorphic signature scheme. In it they mainly consider the problem of outsourcing computation on data authenticated by different users.

With that they aim to create the simplest possible solution to provide data integrity in cloud-based scenarios. Concretely, their multi-key linearly homomorphic signature scheme (mklhs) allows users to upload signed data on a server, and at any later point in time any third party can query the server to compute a linear combination of data authenticated by different users and check the correctness of the returned result.

Their construction generalizes Boneh et al.’s linearly homomorphic signature scheme to the multi-key setting and relies on basic tools of pairing-based cryptography. Compared to existing multi-key homomorphic signature schemes, they claim their mklhs is a conceptually simple and elegant direct construction, which trades-off privacy for efficiency.

They claim that the simplicity of their approach leads them to a very efficient construction that enjoys significantly shorter signatures and higher performance than previous proposals.

Finally, they move onto implement mklhs using two different pairing-friendly curves at the 128-bit security level, a Barreto-Lynn-Scott curve and a Barreto-Naehrig curve.

Their benchmarks illustrate interesting performance trade-offs between these parameters, involving the cost of exponentiation and hashing in pairing groups.

Interestingly the author of this research also happens to be working in the Science Team of Conocrdium which has funded the ongoing research of Aarhus University. Is this a great break through in the field of Cryptographic Engineering and Network Security field. Can more protocols leverage such signature schemes?

Bas Spitters and Danil Annenkov of Concordium have proposed a novel way of embedding functional smart contract languages into the Coq proof assistant using meta-programming techniques.

Their framework allows for developing the meta-theory of smart contract languages using the deep embedding and provides a convenient way for reasoning about concrete contracts using the shallow embedding. They mainly propose an approach that allows to make a connection between the two embeddings in a form of a soundness theorem.

As an instance of their approach they develop an embedding of the Oak smart contract language in Coq and verify several important properties of a crowdfunding contract.

They claim that they have developed techniques that are applicable to all functional smart contract languages thorough this.

I know that this can be a technically heavy subject.But wondering if any researchers or any other blockchain projects have gone down this route?

What are your thoughts on the need for regulation in the cryptocurrency industry? As the industry matures, I think it would make sense to go the regulatory route rather than to fight the "existing system"?

I think Concordium clearly understands the need for Privacy. I like how this project clearly separates between privacy and anonymity. The founder of Concordium is the founder of Saxo Bank. It made sense when he mentions in his video that he's seen trends like the internet grow when no one believed him and the way it matured over time.He thinks something very similar is going to happen in blockchain as well.

According to him Banks and Financial institutions ( he has more than 20 years of experience being CEO of a bank he co founded ) need identity verification and anonymity will not be possible but privacy sure can be possible and Concordium addresses this very point.

It made sense to me. What are your thoughts?

Torben Pedersen started working on the commitment scheme when constructing a secret sharing scheme allowing anyone receiving a share of a secret to verify his share alone — ie., without talking to anyone.

The commitment scheme is a basis of this and has the nice property that one commits to relatively much data in one go in such a way that no one ever — even if we one day get a quantum computer — can get any information about this data unless the owner decides to reveal it.

With this property in place, it is often much easier to prove the security of cryptographic protocols using the commitment scheme. Another reason why it has been so popular is probably that it is very simple, and it has the following property which is useful in many situations:

If I have made commitments C1 and C2 to two numbers, A1 and A2, then the product of the two commitments, C1*C2, is the commitment to A1+A2.

Pedersen Commitment Explained :
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Torben Pedersen is now the CTO of Conocrdium. He beleives that Concordium is not trying to “teach” the Industry how to use the power of Blockchain but Concordium is coming from the Business world to help businesses use blockchain technology to enhance day-to-day productivity.

Concordium plans to introduce an innovative identity layer that allows users to create a verifiable identity off-chain to facilitate compliance with relevant regulations, while also allowing that identity to be represented on-chain in a way that protects the user’s privacy.

The post Covid19 world has changed lives forever, Identity will become even more important now that people will have to return to normalcy in the coming months. This does not change the narrative for lax regulation, in fact regulatory compliance will only get stricter, we have seen FATF introduce more stricter provisions and asking countries to comply. Imagine having to face no regulatory hassles and slowing you down with respect to international business, travel and commerce. This is exactly why this regulatory compliance is important at a protocol level.

In the past there has usually been an extreme balances between user privacy and accountability. Some blockchains allow fully anonymous transactions without any accountability, making them vulnerable to illegal activity. Equally troubling is that while some blockchains do not provide true anonymity for transactions, allowing for transactions and accounts to be tracked, they offer no systematic way to discover the real-world identity of suspicious users.

Concordium claims to offer a workable solution by providing transactional privacy for users, along with a mechanism that allows accountability to local regulations.

This means that transactions are processed without exposing the identity of the sender or receiver, who will also be the only parties that can see the actual amount of a transaction, if the transaction is an encrypted transfer. On the other hand, where a suspicious transaction or set of transactions have been detected, the real-world identity of the user can be revealed to qualified authorities with the help of anonymity revokers and identity providers.

Moreover, if a specific real-world identity is suspected of malicious behavior, anonymity revokers and identity providers can help trace all accounts of that user.

I think this will help regulation get embedded within the protocol design. Though this might seem scary to many, it actually is safe because we know what exactly is being tracked and what is not. So that leaves very less scope for snooping by governments, malicious actors will have less leverage here and users will be protected from hackers and other bad actors.

This will in turn encourage more business to adopt public permissionless blockchains because it would be easier to shield themselves against bad actors, still provide accountability to their audience, while keeping any essential sensitive business components private and most of all they don't really have to worry about regulatory compliance.

This will truly help accelerate open blockchain environments with security and guarantees of permissioned closed environments that business' prefer.