Interchain Timestamping for Mesh Security
Abstract
Fourteen years after the invention of Bitcoin, there has been a proliferation of many permissionless blockchains. Each such chain provides a public ledger that can be written to and read from by anyone. In this multi-chain world, a natural question arises: what is the optimal security an existing blockchain, a consumer chain, can extract by only reading and writing to k other existing blockchains, the provider chains? We design a protocol, called interchain timestamping, and show that it extracts the maximum economic security from the provider chains, as quantified by the slashable safety resilience. We observe that interchain timestamps are already provided by light-client based bridges, so interchain timestamping can be readily implemented for Cosmos chains connected by the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol. We compare interchain timestamping with cross-staking, the original solution to mesh security, as well as with Trustboost, another recent security sharing protocol.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2305.07830,
title = {Interchain Timestamping for Mesh Security},
author = {Ertem Nusret Tas and Runchao Han and David Tse and Fisher Yu and Kamilla Nazirkhanova},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.07830},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
Forthcoming in ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2023