Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain technology gave birth to a decentralized network with a digital currency that has been running for 9 years without any major incident. One of the only problems of this network lies in the low transaction-processing speed.
The emergence of Ethereum marked the advancement to a new era in the age of blockchain. Ethereum's smart contract technology allows decentralized applications to run on blockchain network. Speed, however, remains a major problem and Ethereum has not been able to achieve real improvements in this field, despite all efforts made by Vitalik Buterin and his team.
EOS, which was created in July 2017, fostered new innovations to increase the processing speed of the network and to create a developer-friendly blockchain environment supposed to make the use of blockchain more widespread.
However, some issues in EOS’ design, such as smart contract vulnerabilities, have triggered skepticism among the public regarding the security of the network and its ability to address some key technical challenges. For now, the community consensus promoted by EOS can solve some problems encountered by most public blockchains with their architecture, but once a flawed smart contract is deployed on the blockchain, it is likely to cause serious damage and even destroy the entire system.
Smart contract security is a key issue for the whole blockchain industry and requires designing new solutions in this regard, simplifying the complexity of smart contract writing and providing secure smart contract templates.
InterValue – a project focusing on blockchain infrastructure and platform-level core technology – may well be the project that will revolutionize the blockchain space with its superior smart contract environment as it provides several innovative solutions to overcome technical challenges.
InterValue uses a hierarchical approach similar to computer storage architecture in the implementation of smart contract functions. The Moses Virtual Machine (MVM) supports both declarative non-turing complete smart contracts and advanced Turing complete smart contracts.
The InterValue project conducted in-depth discussions on its unique smart contract system. Those discussions are documented here below in the form of a Q&A.
Q: How does the Intervalue Smart Contract find a balance between security and functionality? In particular, how does the team address the problem of potential quantum attacks?
The InterValue team noticed that security and functionality are often contradictory. Therefore, smart contracts are designed to strike a balance between security and functionality.
InterValue uses the unique architecture of its “Moses virtual machine” supporting declarative non-turing complete smart contracts and advanced Turing complete smart contracts. Users can select one of these two types of contracts based on their experience and needs. This allows a good balance between security and functionality, as well as between computational cost-efficiency and complexity. Thus, it can meet diverse needs in terms of transaction characteristics.
Declarative smart contracts are simple to deploy. They are highly secure and their underlying logic is close to that of legal contracts. Advanced Turing complete smart contracts are relatively difficult to deploy and are mainly used to develop DApps with more complex program logic.
For anti-quantum attacks, InterValue also has a solution. Most current blockchain systems use the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Scheme (ECDSA) and the SHA-1 series of encryption algorithms. However, efficient SHOR attacks can be performed against ECDSA in the context of quantum-attacks.
In order to achieve quantum-resistance, InterValue adopted a new anti-quantum attack cipher algorithm and replaced ECDSA with the NTRUsign-251 signature algorithm. The NTRUsign-251 signature algorithm is a public key cryptography algorithm based on lattice theory. Breaking the security of the signature algorithm requires solving the shortest vector problem in a 502-dimensional integer lattice. The SHOR algorithm attack is invalid is inefficient in this case.
Quantum computers also have no other algorithms to break this security. The best heuristic algorithms are also exponential, and the time complexity of attacking the NTRUsign-251 signature algorithm is about 2^168. Simulteanously, InterValue replaces the current SHA-1 series algorithm with the SHA-3 program's winning algorithm Keccak512. Unlike the classic HASH algorithm, the Keccak512 algorithm uses a sponge structure, which contains many of the latest design concepts and ideas of hash functions and cryptographic algorithms.
Quantum computers have no great advantage in attacking HASH function. At present, the most effective attack method is GROVER algorithm, which can reduce the attack complexity of HASH algorithm from O(2^n) to O( 2^n/2) .
However, the first preimage attack time complexity of the Keccak512 algorithm under quantum-attack is 2^256 and its second preimage attack time complexity is 2^128, which is why NTRUsign251 signature algorithm and Keccak512 algorithm are used. InterValue can effectively resist quantum-attacks.
Q: InterValue implements of smart contract functions in a hierarchical manner. Declarative non-Turing complete smart contracts, advanced Turing complete smart contracts as well as other technologies greatly expand area of possibilities for performing transactions.
Transaction anonymity and inter-node anonymous communication are also key characteristics of InterValue.
InterValue ensures the anonymous protection of transaction information by making transactions unlinkable and untraceable and constantly improving the anonymity protection.
Unlinkeability: for any two outgoing transactions it is impossible to prove they were sent to the same.
Untraceability: for each incoming transaction all possible senders are equiprobable.
Unlinkability and untraceability are attributes that must be satisfied by blockchains with strong privacy protection. InterValue guarantees unlinkability and untraceability by using one-time secret key and ring signature technology. InterValue designs and implements a zero-knowledge proof model as an optional feature that further enhances transaction anonymity.
The InterValue underlying communication network adopts a P2P architecture and then adds an anonymous access mechanism between nodes to ensure the privacy protection. Anonymous communications between nodes are established through local proxy servers that establish virtual circuits and enable application layer P2P encryption, incremental random path generation and so on. Thus, it ensures that the observer does not know where the data really comes from, and what the real destination of the data is.
Q: Ethereum - the most famous blockchain for smart contracts – has been pointed out for a variety of bugs and vulnerabilities. How does Intervalue learn from Ethereum’s mistakes and how does it intend to surpass Ethereum?
InterValue noticed that Ethereum’s programing language (Solidity) is literal and lacks the tools to perform security checks.
Intervalue's smart contract security principles focus on 3 aspects:
Enhancement of the Virtual Machine security: by designing and implementing the “Moses Virtual Machine” architecture, the sandbox structure is designed to protect smart contracts from malicious attacks from the system layer. The Moses Virtual Machine mainly protects smart contracts through technologies such as process-level security isolation execution environment, resource access whitelist mechanism, and minimum privilege principle.
Formal verification of embedded smart contract code: the embedded verification function of the code is in the compilation link, which enhances the security and control of the smart contract.
Updateable smart contracts: a discarding mechanism is applied to smart contracts that are deemed vulnerable. Besides, the newly deployed contracts can inherit the relevant status and data of existing contracts.
Q: Do Ethereum smart contracts inherently have risks? Is the ERC20 system suitable to build token assets? Does InterValue use Bitcoin’s UTXO model? What new developments are there? InterValue offers advanced smart contract functions for off-chain data access. How is that breakthrough?
According to the InterValue team, two main risks weigh on Ethereum smart contracts. One is the vulnerability caused by the flaw in the design of the contract language itself; the other is the coder's unfamiliarity with the smart contract language. Recently, some Tokens using the ERC20 standard have experienced serious problems, making the industry doubt whether ERC20 is suitable for storing important token assets.
InterValue is designed to integrate UTXO and account-based transactions for efficiency and security considerations. Intervalue's advanced smart contracts for off-chain data access have broken through two main points: safe off-chain data access and safe use of off-chain data.
Safe off-chain data access is mainly realized through the built-in off-chain data access protocol and constructing an internal distributed data storage platform. Data can be read and written through the sandbox mode, and the security of off-chain data is checked before it is read. These features reinforce both security and convenience.
Q: High costs are also a problem in today's blockchain space. As a highly practical decentralized distributed application development platform, how revolutionary is EOS and why is it called blockchain 3.0?
Intervalue allows the deployment of applications that are as simple as today's Internet and mobile applications but that are made possible by a sophisticated blockchain infrastructure. It simplifies the configuration issues with significant consequences on the public.
On the other hand, each application on Intervalue’s blockchain can set gas costs and fees according to its own needs. This greatly facilitates developers who need to build low-cost services flexibly.
In contrast to the Internet, blockchain technology should be able to support free applications. Making the blockchain free to use is the key to its widespread adoption. A free platform will also enable developers and businesses to create valuable new services.
Compared with EOS’s blockchain 3.0, Intervalue's advantages are mainly reflected in the following aspects: the design is oriented to the practical blockchain 4.0 infrastructure and the technical features have a more-advanced design. The platform is designed to support large-scale popular applications.
Blockchain technology is still far from perfect and the difference between different blockchains is pretty tiny. Between the development phase and the construction of the ecosystem, there will not be many effective users. With continuous development and experience, the InterValue project will become more and more competitive in the future.
Projects with the strongest popularity one are not necessarily the best projects.
Considering its technical strength, transparency, infrastructure and current market conditions, InterValue has the opportunity to become the top next-generation blockchain project. If it can successfully achieve its goals, solve cross-chain transactions and double-layer architecture, problems such as transaction speed will have an important and historical significance for the blockchain world.
The InterValue project has great potential. It could definitely compete with EOS in terms of investment potential.