dOra is a distributed oracle built with the cryptographic techniques of DKG and DSS, which enables the committee paradigm, used for multi-party computation. The system is capable of providing oracle functions in a distributed manner, while also providing more advanced features, such as storage or distributed processing.
This demo is proposed as a proof of concept of the oracular and storage functionality.
Every node and the committee itself uses the DID standard for identification and communication purposes. This demo is currently using the Stardust Testnet network as a transport layer and to deploy DID Documents. If you want to run this demo using the IOTA Mainnet (Chrysalis) look at the branch Chrysalis.
To implement DKG, DSS and other cryptographic features we use our library kyber-rs which is Rust partial porting of the DEDIS kyber library written in Go.
The committee will provide distributed storage by storing data on each node. When data has to be retrieved, nodes will try to produce a distributed signature of that data without exchanging the value. To produce a valid signature the majority of the nodes must sign the same data (as the partial signature would not be considered valid otherwise). This is because the distributed signature works with a minimum threshold of participants, which was set to be the majority. This means that in an honest working environment, a committee's signature can be produced only if most of the nodes still possess that data, and that signature will be a valid Proof of (data) Conservation for the committee.
The very same logic of a blind signature aggregation consensus can be applied to many kinds of operations, such as the oracular function, execution, etc.
In this demo, you can instance some nodes through the provided docker-compose file. Every fresh node will create its keypair and DID document on the Tangle, and connect to its local storage (a dedicated minio instance).
To create a committee and send requests, a dedicated CLI app is provided by the very same executable. The nodes will create a committee in response to the governor entity, which, in this demo, is represented by a special tag for tagged data on the Tangle. Requests will be forwarded to the committee using a tag derived from its DID, and the committee's logs and outputs will also be published on the same tag.
The nodes will communicate using the Tangle, without the necessity of exchanging IPs or anything. This means that you can run multiple nodes from different machines and networks and they will form a committee using only the reciprocal DIDs, with some initial input from the governor.
For a detailed set of instructions regarding how to properly run and customize the demo, you can look at the INSTRUCTIONS.
This demo is not intended to be fully representative of the final dOra system, either functionally or formally. Several possible security holes are present, deliberately overlooked as not of fundamental importance for a proof of concept.
This demo is built for the Stardust Testnet. The committee's funding (received through the faucet) is necessary to publish L1 DID documents and could be lost at the end of the demo. A way to retrieve funds from a committee's address is not yet implemented. We disclaim any responsibility for loss of funds as we publish this demo to be used ONLY with Stardust Testnet without funds retrival.
If you want to get in touch with us feel free to contact us at g.pescetelli@teleconsys.it