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A Secure Cross-Shard View-Change Protocol for Sharding Blockchains

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Information Security and Privacy (ACISP 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 13083))

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Abstract

A complete sharding blockchain consists of many vital components, the two most important of which are the intra-shard consensus algorithm and the cross-shard transaction processing method. The latter usually requires a two-phase commit protocol, which usually relies on the shard leaders to transfer critical messages among different shards. In the process, a leader might behave maliciously. In response to possible problems in cross-shard transaction processing, this paper makes the following contributions. First, this paper proposes a cross-shard transaction censorship attack that may be launched by a shard leader. The leader might behave honestly inside the shard while does not transfer key messages between the shards. Second, a cross-shard view-change protocol is proposed to defend against the attack. When a shard leader behaves maliciously between shards, a related shard’s members can run an intra-shard consensus algorithm to generate a proof of the leader’s malicious behavior and forward the proof to the corresponding shard’s members. The shard members could launch an intra-shard view-change operation to replace the malicious leader with a new one. Third, it is proved that the proposed protocol satisfies consistency and liveness. The secure cross-shard view-change protocol can be applied to most sharding blockchains to ensure the safe and efficient execution of cross-shard transactions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Strong consistency means transactions are confirmed instantly, and the probability of a fork in the blockchain is negligible.

  2. 2.

    Also referred to as network model in related work.

  3. 3.

    The notation “\(\preceq \)” means “is a prefix of”.

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Acknowledgements

Our deepest gratitude goes to the editors and reviewers for their careful work and meaningful suggestions that help improve this paper. This paper is supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFB1400702, 2020YFB10056, 2019QY(Y)0602), the Natural Science Foundation of China (61932011, 61972019, 61772538, 61532021, 91646203, 61672083, 61972017, 61972018, 61932014, 72031001), the National Cryptography Development Fund (MMJJ20180215), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (YWF-20-BJ-J-1039).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Cyber Science and Technology, Beihang University, Beijing, China

    Yizhong Liu, Jianwei Liu, Yiming Hei, Yu Xia & Qianhong Wu

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  1. Yizhong Liu
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  3. Yiming Hei
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Correspondence to Yiming Hei .

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  1. University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia

    Joonsang Baek

  2. Data61, CSIRO, Marsfield, NSW, Australia

    Sushmita Ruj

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Liu, Y., Liu, J., Hei, Y., Xia, Y., Wu, Q. (2021). A Secure Cross-Shard View-Change Protocol for Sharding Blockchains. In: Baek, J., Ruj, S. (eds) Information Security and Privacy. ACISP 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13083. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90567-5_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90567-5_19

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