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Fortress: Fork Resistant Transparency logs Relying on Social graph Structure

Anastasiia Kucherenko, Melissa Chase, Esha Ghosh · 2026 · arXiv (Cornell University)

DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2610.26327 · cited by 0 works (OpenAlex) · open-access PDF

Russian

Прозрачные серверные системы, такие как ключевая прозрачность (KT), сертификатная прозрачность и бинарная прозрачность, требуют, чтобы все честные участники видели один и тот же взгляд на секретный серверный каталог, который не доверяется, или, если этого не произойдет, что неправильное поведение публично обнаружено. Каждый существующий дизайн закрывает этот разрыв с внешним доверительным анкером: публично доступная бюллетеньная доска (BB), блокчейн или сеть шуток OOB среди аудиторов. Мы наблюдаем, что системы прозрачности уже имеют встроенный ресурс, который до сих пор был игнорирован: социальный график, вызванный самими пользователями. Мы спрашиваем, может ли он полностью заменить бюллетеньную доску или внешний слуховой канал

Machine translation (Meta M2M100); the English original follows.

Abstract

Transparency systems -- such as Key Transparency (KT), Certificate Transparency, and binary transparency -- require that all honest participants see the same view of an untrusted server's directory, or, failing that, that the misbehaviour is publicly detected. Every existing design closes this gap with an external trust anchor: a publicly available bulletin board (BB), a blockchain, or an out-of-band (OOB) gossip network among auditors. We observe that transparency systems already have a built-in resource that has so far been overlooked: the social graph induced by the users themselves. We ask whether it can replace the bulletin board or the external gossip channel entirely, and answer in the affirmative (if occasional out-of-band interactions are allowed). We formalise a new primitive, Social-Graph based Forking-Resilient Transparency (sg-FORT), which captures the security guarantees of a BB-free transparency system and we construct Fortress Fork Resistant Transparency logs Relying on Social graph Structure, to our knowledge the first such protocol. In every epoch either all users output the same post, or at least one honest user produces a publicly verifiable Proof of Misbehaviour. Our guarantees hold against an arbitrary malicious server, including a snapshot adversary that may compromise a user and learn its secret state, as long as the server does not compromise close users. In honest executions, OOB interactions occur only when a user resets their secrets, so the total OOB cost approaches the natural lower bound of one call per reset -- dramatically below the full-gossip alternative. We prove security under standard cryptographic assumptions on signatures and dictionary commitment. Under simplifying assumptions (synchronous epochs, always-online users), we view this as a first feasibility result that opens up the design space of social-graph-based transparency systems.

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Topics: Computer science, Computer security, Transparency (behavior), Gossip, Verifiable secret sharing, Compromise

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