Public Report – Zcash Zebra Security Assessment
In Spring 2023, the Zcash Foundation engaged NCC Group to conduct a security assessment of the Zebrad application. Zebrad is a network client that participates in the Zcash consensus mechanism by validating blocks, maintaining the blockchain state (best chain and viable non-finalized chains), and gossiping blocks, transactions, and peer addresses. Five consultants performed the review, […]
How to Spot and Prevent an Eclipse Attack
Studies of blockchain architectures often start with the consensus algorithms and implicitly assume that information flows perfectly through the underlying peer-to-peer network, and peer discovery is sound and fully decentralized. In practice this is not always the case. A few years ago, a team of researchers looked at the Bitcoin1 and Ethereum2 networks in two […]
On the Use of Pedersen Commitments for Confidential Payments
The increased adoption of financial blockchains has fueled a lot of cryptography research in recent years. One area of high interest is transaction confidentiality which requires hiding investors’ account balances and transaction amounts, while enforcing compliance rules and performing validity checks on all activities. This blog post will look at the Zether [2] protocol, which […]