François-Xavier Wicht

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3ranked-venue papers
2as first author
3since 2021 · last 2026
0009-0005-6090-7901ORCID · verified

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Security and privacy · 3 · 2 first-author · 3 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 Persistent BitTorrent Trackers
abstract
Private BitTorrent trackers enforce upload-to-download ratios to prevent free-riding, but suffer from three critical weaknesses: reputation cannot move between trackers, centralized servers create single points of failure, and upload statistics are self-reported and unverifiable. When a tracker shuts down, users lose their contribution history and cannot prove their standing to new communities. We address these problems by storing reputation in smart contracts and replacing self-reports with cryptographic attestations. Peers sign receipts for received pieces; the tracker aggregates them via BLS signatures and updates reputation. If a tracker is unavailable, peers fall back to an authenticated distributed hash table (DHT): stored reputation acts as a public key infrastructure (PKI), preserving access control without the tracker. Reputation is portable across tracker failures through single-hop migration in factory-deployed contracts. We also address the privacy implications of publishing public keys and reputations tied to private trackers on a public ledger: we propose ephemeral session keys to prevent linking peer identities, zero-knowledge membership proofs for anonymous DHT participation, and confidential reputation using homomorphic commitments. We formalize the security requirements, prove four security properties under standard cryptographic assumptions, and evaluate a prototype. Measurements show that transfer receipts add less than 5\% end-to-end overhead with typical piece sizes. To minimize signing overhead, we adopt a hybrid signature scheme: ECDSA signs individual piece receipts at transfer time for low per-operation latency, while BLS serves as the overarching scheme, enabling compact aggregation of many receipts into a single proof at report time. This design reduces client-side signing cost by an order of magnitude compared to using BLS throughout.
François-Xavier Wicht, Zhengwei Tong, Shunfan Zhou, Aviv Yaish
EuroS&P1
2025 Toxic Decoys: A Path to Scaling Privacy-Preserving Cryptocurrencies
abstract
Anonymous cryptocurrencies attracted much attention over the past decade, yet ensuring both integrity and privacy in an open system remains challenging. Their transactions preserve privacy because they do not reveal on which earlier transaction they depend, specifically which outputs of previous transactions are spent. However, achieving privacy imposes a significant storage overhead due to two current limitations. First, the set of potentially unspent outputs of transactions grows indefinitely because the design hides cryptographically which one have been consumed; and, second, additional data must be stored for each spent output to ensure integrity, that is, to prevent that it can be spent again. We introduce a privacy-preserving payment scheme that mitigates these issues by randomly partitioning unspent outputs into fixed-size bins. Once a bin has been referenced in as many transactions as its size, it is pruned from the ledger. This approach reduces storage overhead while preserving privacy. We first highlight the scalability benefits of using smaller untraceability sets instead of considering the entire set of outputs, as done in several privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies. We then formalize the security and privacy notions required for a scalable, privacy-preserving payment system and analyze how randomized partitioning plays a key role in both untraceability and scalability. To instantiate our approach, we provide a construction based on Merkle trees, which ensures efficient argument systems and easy pruning of the state. We finally show the storage benefits of our scheme and analyze its resilience against large-scale flooding attacks using empirical transaction data.
Christian Cachin, François-Xavier Wicht
Proc. Priv. Enhancing Technol.2
2024 A Transaction-Level Model for Blockchain Privacy
François-Xavier Wicht, Zhipeng Wang 0009, Duc Viet Le 0001, Christian Cachin
FC (2)1