Related papers: QuickSync: A Quickly Synchronizing PoS-Based Block…
Consensus protocols play a pivotal role to balance security and efficiency in blockchain systems. In this paper, we propose an evaluation framework for blockchain consensus protocols termed as AlphaBlock. In this framework, we compare the…
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…
In the white book of Bitcion, Satoshi Nakamoto described a bitcoin system that can realize point-to-point online payment without a third-party organization. After supporting this magical application scenario and subverting the traditional…
The proof-of-work consensus protocol suffers from two main limitations: waste of energy and offering only probabilistic guarantees about the status of the blockchain. This paper introduces SklCoin, a new Byzantine consensus protocol and its…
Accountability, the ability to provably identify protocol violators, gained prominence as the main economic argument for the security of proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols. Rollups, the most popular scaling solution for blockchains, typically…
In the paper, we present designs for multiple blockchain consensus primitives and a novel blockchain system, all based on the use of trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as Intel SGX-enabled CPUs. First, we show how using TEEs for…
Fault-tolerant distributed systems move the trust in a single party to a majority of parties participating in the protocol. This makes blockchain based crypto-currencies possible: they allow parties to agree on a total order of transactions…
Many blockchain consensus protocols have been proposed recently to scale the throughput of a blockchain with available bandwidth. However, these protocols are becoming increasingly complex, making it more and more difficult to produce…
Bitcoin is the most secure blockchain in the world, supported by the immense hash power of its Proof-of-Work miners. Proof-of-Stake chains are energy-efficient, have fast finality but face several security issues: susceptibility to…
Bitcoin provides freshness properties by forming a blockchain where each block is associated with its timestamp and the previous block. Due to these properties, the Bitcoin protocol is being used as a decentralized, trusted, and secure…
To address the large amount of energy wasted by blockchains, we propose a decentralized consensus protocol for blockchains in which the computation can be used to search for good approximate solutions to any optimization problem. Our…
Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is a prominent Sybil control mechanism for blockchain-based systems. In "e-PoS: Making PoS Decentralized and Fair," Saad et al. (TPDS'21) introduced a new Proof-of-Stake protocol, e-PoS, to enhance PoS applications'…
Although proof of work (PoW) consensus dominates the current blockchain-based systems mostly, it has always been criticized for the uneconomic brute-force calculation. As alternatives, energy-conservation and energy-recycling mechanisms…
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer payment system proposed by Nakamoto in 2008. Based on the Nakamoto consensus, Bagaria, Kannan, Tse, Fanti, and Viswanath proposed the Prism protocol in 2018 and showed that it achieves near-optimal blockchain…
Spamming attacks are a serious concern for consensus protocols, as witnessed by recent outages of a major blockchain, Solana. They cause congestion and excessive message delays in a real network due to its bandwidth constraints. In…
Cross-Blockchain communication has gained traction due to the increasing fragmentation of blockchain networks and scalability solutions such as side-chaining and sharding. With SmartSync, we propose a novel concept for cross-blockchain…
The Nakamoto consensus protocol underlying the Bitcoin blockchain uses proof of work as a voting mechanism. Honest miners who contribute hashing power towards securing the chain try to extend the longest chain they are aware of. Despite its…
Although the emergence of the programmable smart contract makes blockchain systems easily embrace a wider range of industrial areas, how to execute smart contracts efficiently becomes a big challenge nowadays. Due to the existence of…
Recent works have proposed new Byzantine consensus algorithms for blockchains based on epidemics, a design which enables highly scalable performance at a low cost. These methods however critically depend on a secure random peer sampling…
Currently there exist many blockchains with weak trust guarantees, limiting applications and participation. Existing solutions to boost the trust using a stronger blockchain, e.g., via checkpointing, requires the weaker blockchain to give…