As blockchain technology and cryptocurrency become increasingly mainstream, ever-increasing energy costs required to maintain the computational power running these decentralized platforms create a market for more energy-efficient hardware. Photonic cryptographic hash functions, which use photonic integrated circuits to accelerate computation, promise energy efficiency for verifying transactions and mining in a cryptonetwork. Like many analog computing approaches, however, current proposals for photonic cryptographic hash functions that promise similar security guarantees as Bitcoin are susceptible to systematic error, so multiple devices may not reach a consensus on computation despite high numerical precision (associated with low photodetector noise). In this paper, we theoretically and experimentally demonstrate that a more general family of robust discrete analog cryptographic hash functions, which we introduce as LightHash, leverages integer matrix-vector operations on photonic mesh networks of interferometers. The difficulty of LightHash can be adjusted to be sufficiently tolerant to systematic error (calibration error, loss error, coupling error, and phase error) and preserve inherent security guarantees present in the Bitcoin protocol. Finally, going beyond our proof-of-concept, we define a ``photonic advantage'' criterion and justify how recent developments in CMOS optoelectronics (including analog-digital conversion) provably achieve such advantage for robust and digitally-verifiable photonic computing and ultimately generate a new market for decentralized photonic technology.
翻译:随着连锁技术和加密货币日益成为主流,维持这些分散平台运行的计算电量所需的能源成本不断增加,为维持这些分散平台的计算能力创造了一个更节能的硬件市场。光学加密散列功能,利用光学集成电路加速计算,为核查交易和在加密网络中开采提供能源效率。然而,与许多模拟计算方法一样,目前关于光学加密散列功能的建议,即像Bitcoin那样有类似安全保障的建议容易发生系统性错误,因此,尽管数字精确度高(与低光辨识器噪音相关),但多种装置可能无法在计算上达成共识。在本文中,我们理论上和实验性地表明,一个更普遍的、强力的离散类似加密加密功能大家庭,利用光学集成集成集成集成电路网络核查交易和开采的节能效率。LightHash的难度可以调整到足够容忍系统错误(校正错误、损失错误、合并错误和分层错误),并保存Bitcoin协议中存在的固有安全保障。最后,我们作为LightthHH-M-im-immocal Profrical-deal ex-defical acal decal decal decal decal deficreal decal decal dequidestrate) 和我们最终定义了一个新的数字化了一个新的数字化标准。