Related papers: Fraud and Data Availability Proofs: Maximising Lig…
Validating a blockchain incurs heavy computation, communication, and storage costs. As a result, clients with limited resources, called light nodes, cannot verify transactions independently and must trust full nodes, making them vulnerable…
Full nodes in a blockchain network store and verify a copy of the whole blockchain. Unlike full nodes, light clients are low-capacity devices that want to validate certain data on a blockchain. They query the data they want from a full…
This paper presents a mathematically rigorous formal analysis of Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) clients, as specified in Section 8 of the original Bitcoin white paper, versus non-mining full nodes operated by home users. It defines…
Lazy blockchains decouple consensus from transaction verification and execution to increase throughput. Although they can contain invalid transactions (e.g., double spends) as a result, these can easily be filtered out by full nodes that…
Light clients are essential for scalable blockchain systems because they verify data availability without downloading full blocks. In data availability sampling based systems, sampled cells are retrieved from a peer-to-peer network and…
Blockchains are among the most powerful technologies to realize decentralized information systems. In order to safely enjoy all guarantees provided by a blockchain, one should maintain a full node, therefore maintaining an updated local…
Blockchain protocols are based on a distributed database where stored data is guaranteed to be immutable. The requirement that all nodes have to maintain their own local copy of the database ensures security while consensus mechanisms help…
This paper presents a complete formal specification, protocol description, and mathematical proof structure for Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) as originally defined in the Bitcoin whitepaper \cite{nakamoto2008}. In stark contrast to…
Lightweight Bitcoin clients execute a Simple Payment Verification (SPV) protocol to verify the validity of transactions related to a particular user. Currently, lightweight clients use Bloom filters to significantly reduce the amount of…
Light clients are gaining increasing attention in the literature since they obviate the need for users to set up dedicated blockchain full nodes. While the literature features a number of light client instantiations, most light client…
Light nodes are clients in blockchain systems that only store a small portion of the blockchain ledger. In certain blockchains, light nodes are vulnerable to a data availability (DA) attack where a malicious node makes the light nodes…
Blockchain applications often rely on lightweight clients to access and verify on-chain data efficiently without the need to run a resource-intensive full node. These light clients must maintain robust security to protect the blockchain's…
In Tendermint blockchains, the proof-of-stake mechanism and the underlying consensus algorithm entail a dynamic fault model that implies that the active validators (nodes that sign blocks) may change over time, and a quorum of these…
In a blockchain Data Availability Attack (DAA), a malicious node publishes a block header but withholds part of the block, which contains invalid transactions. Honest full nodes, which can download and store the full blockchain, are aware…
Client diversity is a cornerstone of blockchain resilience, yet most networks suffer from a dangerously skewed distribution of client implementations. This monoculture exposes the network to very risky scenarios, such as massive financial…
The video footage produced by the surveillance cameras is an important evidence to support criminal investigations. Video evidence can be sourced from public (trusted) as well as private (untrusted) surveillance systems. This raises the…
We propose LazyLedger, a design for distributed ledgers where the blockchain is optimised for solely ordering and guaranteeing the availability of transaction data. Responsibility for executing and validating transactions is shifted to only…
In Ethereum, the practice of verifying the validity of the passed addresses is a common practice, which is a crucial step to ensure the secure execution of smart contracts. Vulnerabilities in the process of address verification can lead to…
We conduct a systematic study on the light client of permissionless blockchains, in the setting where the full nodes and the light clients are rational. Under such a game-theoretic model, we design a superlight-client protocol to enable a…
The scalability limitations of public blockchains have hindered their widespread adoption in real-world applications. While the Ethereum community is pushing forward in zk-rollup (zero-knowledge rollup) solutions, such as introducing the…