TY - JOUR TI - Blockchains from non-idealized hash functions AU - Garay, J.A. AU - Kiayias, A. AU - Panagiotakos, G. JO - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) PY - 2020 VL - 12550 LNCS TODO - null SP - 291-321 PB - Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH SN - null TODO - 10.1007/978-3-030-64375-1_11 TODO - Bitcoin; Computation theory; Hardness; Hash functions, Collision resistance; Common reference string; Function properties; Modular specifications; Random Oracle model; Randomness extractions; Security analysis; The standard model, Blockchain TODO - The formalization of concrete, non-idealized hash function properties sufficient to prove the security of Bitcoin and related protocols has been elusive, as all previous security analyses of blockchain protocols have been performed in the random oracle model. In this paper we identify three such properties, and then construct a blockchain protocol whose security can be reduced to them in the standard model assuming a common reference string (CRS). The three properties are: collision resistance, computational randomness extraction and iterated hardness. While the first two properties have been extensively studied, iterated hardness has been empirically stress-tested since the rise of Bitcoin; in fact, as we demonstrate in this paper, any attack against it (assuming the other two properties hold) results in an attack against Bitcoin. In addition, iterated hardness puts forth a new class of search problems which we term iterated search problems (ISP). ISPs enable the concise and modular specification of blockchain protocols, and may be of independent interest. © International Association for Cryptologic Research 2020. ER -