Sark: Oblivious Integrity Without Global State

TL;DR

Sark is a novel architecture for transferring unforgeable, stateful, oblivious assets, featuring core subsystems like Porters and Sloop, with analysis on security and decentralization trade-offs.

Contribution

The paper introduces Sark, a new reference architecture with subsystems for secure asset transfer, and analyzes its security and decentralization properties.

Findings

System uses Porters to accumulate and roll-up commitments.

Sloop is a permissioned, crash fault-tolerant blockchain system.

Analysis based on CIA Triad and local centrality concept.

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce Sark, a reference architecture for transferring unforgeable, stateful, oblivious (USO) assets. We describe the motivation, design, and implementation of the core subsystems of Sark, Porters, which accumulate and roll-up commitments from Clients, and Sloop, a permissioned, crash fault-tolerant (CFT) blockchain system. We analyse the operation of the system using the `CIA Triad': Confidentiality, Availability, and Integrity. We then introduce the concept of \textit{local centrality} and use it to address design trade-offs related to decentralization. Finally, we point to future work on Byzantine fault-tolerance (BFT), and mitigating the local centrality of Porters.