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Fraud and Data Availability Proofs: Detecting Invalid Blocks in Light Clients

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 12675))

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Abstract

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. Instead of validating blocks, they assume that the chain favoured by the blockchain’s consensus algorithm only contains valid blocks, and that the majority of block producers are honest. By allowing such clients to receive fraud proofs generated by fully validating nodes that show that a block violates the protocol rules, and combining this with probabilistic sampling techniques to verify that all of the data in a block actually is available to be downloaded so that fraud can be detected, we can eliminate the honest-majority assumption for block validity, and instead make much weaker assumptions about a minimum number of honest nodes that rebroadcast data. Fraud and data availability proofs are key to enabling on-chain scaling of blockchains while maintaining a strong assurance that on-chain data is available and valid. We present, implement, and evaluate a fraud and data availability proof system.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “https://github.com/musalbas/rsmt2d".

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Acknowledgements

Mustafa Al-Bassam is supported by a scholarship from The Alan Turing Institute and Alberto Sonnino is supported by the European Commission Horizon 2020 DECODE project under grant agreement number 732546.

Thanks to George Danezis, Alexander Hicks and Sarah Meiklejohn for helpful discussions about the mathematical proofs.

Thanks to our shephard Sreeram Kannan for providing helpful feedback.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University College London, London, UK

    Mustafa Al-Bassam & Alberto Sonnino

  2. Ethereum Research, Zug, Switzerland

    Vitalik Buterin

  3. LazyLedger Labs, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

    Ismail Khoffi

Authors
  1. Mustafa Al-Bassam
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  2. Alberto Sonnino
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  3. Vitalik Buterin
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  4. Ismail Khoffi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mustafa Al-Bassam .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Nikita Borisov

  2. KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Claudia Diaz

Appendix

Appendix

See the full version of the paper at https://fc21.ifca.ai/papers/83.pdf.

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Al-Bassam, M., Sonnino, A., Buterin, V., Khoffi, I. (2021). Fraud and Data Availability Proofs: Detecting Invalid Blocks in Light Clients. In: Borisov, N., Diaz, C. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12675. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64331-0_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64331-0_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-64330-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-64331-0

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