PQFabric: A Permissioned Blockchain Secure from Both Classical and Quantum Attacks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hyperledger Fabric is a prominent and flexible solution for building permissioned distributed ledger platforms. Access control and identity management relies on a Membership Service Provider (MSP) whose cryptographic interface only handles standard PKI methods for authentication: RSA and ECDSA classical signatures. Also, MSP-issued credentials may use only one signature scheme, tying the credential-related functions to classical single-signature primitives. RSA and ECDSA are vulnerable to quantum attacks, with an ongoing post-quantum standardization process to identify quantum-safe drop-in replacements. In this paper, we propose a redesign of Fabric's credential-management procedures and related specifications in order to incorporate hybrid digital signatures, protecting against both classical and quantum attacks using one classical and one quantum-safe signature. We create PQFabric, an implementation of Fabric with hybrid signatures that integrates with the Open Quantum Safe (OQS) library. Our implementation offers complete crypto-agility, with the ability to perform live migration to a hybrid quantum-safe blockchain and select any existing OQS signature algorithm for each node. We perform comparative benchmarks of PQFabric with each of the NIST candidates and alternates, revealing that long public keys and signatures lead to an increase in hashing time that is sometimes comparable to the time spent signing or verifying messages itself. This is a new and potentially significant issue in the migration of blockchains to post-quantum signatures.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".