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Generic Superlight Client for Permissionless Blockchains

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Computer Security – ESORICS 2020 (ESORICS 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 12309))

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Abstract

We initiate a systematic study on the light-client protocol of permissionless blockchains, in the setting where full nodes and light clients are rational. In the game-theoretic model, we design a superlight-client protocol to enable a light client to employ some relaying full nodes (e.g., two or one) to read the blockchain. The protocol is “generic”, i.e., it can be deployed disregarding underlying consensuses, and it is also “superlight”, i.e., the computational cost of the light client to predicate the (non)existence of a transaction in the blockchain becomes a small constant. Since our protocol resolves a fundamental challenge of broadening the usage of blockchain technology, it captures a wide variety of important use-cases such as multi-chain wallets, DApp browsers and more.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Writing in the blockchain is trivial, as one can gossip with some full nodes to diffuse its messages to the entire blockchain network (a.k.a., network diffuse functionality [4, 22]). Then the blockchain’s liveness ensures the inclusion of the messages [22].

  2. 2.

    Note that the case of one relay can model the pessimistic scenario that all recruited full nodes are colluding to form a single coalition.

  3. 3.

    Remark that the above modeling requires the block hashes can be read by smart contracts from the blockchain’s internal states (e.g. available global variables) [20]. In Ethereum, this currently can be realized via the proposal of Andrew Miller [45] and will be incorporated due to the already-planned Ethereum enhancement EIP-210 [2].

  4. 4.

    Remark that in the full paper [42], we define another class of chain predicates whose falseness is provable instead of trueness, which can captured by our protocol as well, though we omit detailed discussions here for presentation simplicity.

  5. 5.

    Such assumption can be granted if considering the client and the relays can set up private communication channels on demand. In practice, this can be done because (i) the client can “broadcast” its network address via the blockchain [43], or (ii) there is a trusted name service that tracks the network addresses of the relays.

  6. 6.

    Remark that due to the notion of \(\epsilon \)-sequential equilibrium, the rational game players are not sensitive for any utility increments that are less than \(\epsilon \).

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Acknowledgment

We thank anonymous reviewers for valuable comments. Qiang is supported in part by JDDigits via the JDD-NJIT-ISCAS Joint Blockchain Lab and a Google Faculty Award.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, 07102, USA

    Yuan Lu, Qiang Tang & Guiling Wang

  2. JDD-NJIT-ISCAS Joint Blockchain Lab, Newark, USA

    Qiang Tang

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  1. Yuan Lu
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Correspondence to Yuan Lu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

    Liqun Chen

  2. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Ninghui Li

  3. Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Kaitai Liang

  4. University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

    Steve Schneider

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Lu, Y., Tang, Q., Wang, G. (2020). Generic Superlight Client for Permissionless Blockchains. In: Chen, L., Li, N., Liang, K., Schneider, S. (eds) Computer Security – ESORICS 2020. ESORICS 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12309. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59013-0_35

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