Evervault Papers

Crypto means cryptography

The most important cryptography papers spanning the past, present, and future of cryptosystems & cryptology.

Non-Malleable Cryptography

Danny Dolev, Cynthia Dwork, & Moni Naor

On the (Im)possibility of Obfuscating Programs

Boaz Barak, Oded Goldreich, Rusell Impagliazzo, Steven Rudich, Amit Sahai, Salil Vadhan, & Ke Yang

Computer Systems Established, Maintained and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups

David L. Chaum

Computer Systems Established, Maintained and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups

David L. Chaum — Published April 1982

This paper is the first known proposal for a blockchain protocol.

Chaum describes the design of a distributed computer system that can be established, maintained, and trusted by mutually suspicious groups.

It is a public record-keeping system with group membership consistency and private transaction computations that protects individual privacy through physical security.

The building blocks of this system include physically-secure “vaults”, existing cryptographic primitives (symmetric and asymmetric encryption, cryptographic hash functions, digital signatures), and a new primitive introduced by Chaum—threshold secret sharing, i.e. “where some threshold of sub-partial keys are sufficient to reconstruct the original partial key from which the sub-partials were originally formed”.

For more on the history of blockchain technologies, consider On the Origins and Variations of Blockchain Technologies.

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