Related papers: Unconditionally Safe Light Client
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…
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…
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…
This paper examines the economic and security implications of Proof-of-Stake (POS) designs, providing a survey of POS design choices and their underlying economic principles in prominent POS-blockchains. The paper argues that…
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…
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…
Popular Ethereum wallets (like MetaMask) entrust centralized infrastructure providers (e.g., Infura) to run the consensus client logic on their behalf. As a result, these wallets are light-weight and high-performant, but come with security…
As of July 15, 2023, Ethererum, which is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain [1] has around 410 Billion USD in total assets on chain (popularly referred to as total-value-locked, TVL) but has only 33 Billion USD worth of ETH staked in…
Light clients, also known as Simple Payment Verification (SPV) clients, are nodes which only download a small portion of the data in a blockchain, and use indirect means to verify that a given chain is valid. Typically, instead of…
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…
Bitcoin is the first fully-decentralized permissionless blockchain protocol to achieve a high level of security, but at the expense of poor throughput and latency. Scaling the performance of Bitcoin has a been a major recent direction of…
Bitcoin is the most secure blockchain in the world, supported by the immense hash power of its Proof-of-Work miners, but consumes huge amount of energy. Proof-of-Stake chains are energy-efficient, have fast finality and accountability, but…
Proof of Stake (PoS) is a burgeoning Sybil resistance mechanism that aims to have a digital asset ("token") serve as security collateral in crypto networks. However, PoS has so far eluded a comprehensive threat model that encompasses both…
Smart contracts enable users to execute payments depending on complex program logic. Ethereum is the most notable example of a blockchain that supports smart contracts leveraged for countless applications including games, auctions and…
The blockchain data structure maintained via the longest-chain rule---popularized by Bitcoin---is a powerful algorithmic tool for consensus algorithms. Such algorithms achieve consistency for blocks in the chain as a function of their depth…
In this paper, we develop BlockMarkchain, as a secure data market place, where individual data sellers can exchange certified data with buyers, in a secure environment, without any mutual trust among the parties, and without trusting on a…
Proof-of-stake blockchain protocols are becoming one of the most promising alternatives to the energy-consuming proof-of-work protocols. However, one particularly critical threat in the PoS setting is the well-known long-range attacks…
The blockchain technology enables mutually untrusting participants to reach consensus on the state of a distributed and decentralized ledger (called a blockchain) in a permissionless setting. The consensus protocol of the blockchain imposes…
Permissionless Proof-of-Stake (PoS) economic security is predicated on the high cost of violating consensus safety or liveness. We show that liquid staking introduces additional risks that are not captured by standard PoS economic security…
Smart Contracts (SCs) are programs stored in a Blockchain to ensure agreements between two or more parties. Due to the unchangeable essence of Blockchain, failures or errors in SCs become perpetual once published. The reliability of SCs is…