Scaling Distributed Ledgers and Privacy-Preserving Applications

This thesis proposes techniques aiming to make blockchain technologies and smart contract platforms practical by improving their scalability, latency, and privacy. This thesis starts by presenting the design and implementation of Chainspace, a distributed ledger that supports user defined smart contracts and execute user-supplied transactions on their objects. The correct execution of smart contract transactions is publicly verifiable. Chainspace is scalable by sharding state; it is secure against subsets of nodes trying to compromise its integrity or availability properties through Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT). This thesis also introduces a family of replay attacks against sharded distributed ledgers targeting cross-shard consensus protocols; they allow an attacker, with network access only, to double-spend resources with minimal efforts. We then build Byzcuit, a new cross-shard consensus protocol that is immune to those attacks and that is tailored to run at the heart of Chainspace. Next, we propose FastPay, a high-integrity settlement system for pre-funded payments that can be used as a financial side-infrastructure for Chainspace to support low-latency retail payments. This settlement system is based on Byzantine Consistent Broadcast as its core primitive, foregoing the expenses of full atomic commit channels (consensus). The resulting system has extremely low-latency for both confirmation and payment finality. Finally, this thesis proposes Coconut, a selective disclosure credential scheme supporting distributed threshold issuance, public and private attributes, re-randomization, and multiple unlinkable selective attribute revelations. It ensures authenticity and availability even when a subset of credential issuing authorities are malicious or offline, and natively integrates with Chainspace to enable a number of scalable privacy-preserving applications

Blockchain in maritime cybersecurity

Blockchain technologies can be used for many different purposes from handling large amounts of data to creating better solutions for privacy protection, user authentication and a tamper proof ledger which lead to growing interest among industries. Smart contracts, fog nodes and different consensus methods create a scalable environment to secure multi-party connections with equal trust of participanting nodes’ identity. Different blockchains have multiple options for methodologies to use in different environments. This thesis has focused on Ethereum based open-source solutions that fit the remote pilotage environment the best. Autonomous vehicular networks and remote operatable devices have been a popular research topic in the last few years. Remote pilotage in maritime environment is persumed to reach its full potential with fully autonomous vessels in ten years which makes the topic interesting for all researchers. However cybersecurity in these environments is especially important because incidents can lead to financial loss, reputational damage, loss of customer and industry trust and environmental damage. These complex environments also have multiple attack vectors because of the systems wireless nature. Denial-of-service (DoS), man-in-the-middle (MITM), message or executable code injection, authentication tampering and GPS spoofing are one of the most usual attacks against large IoT systems. This is why blockchain can be used for creating a tamper proof environment with no single point-of-failure. After extensive research about best performing blockchain technologies Ethereum seemed the most preferable for decentralised maritime environment. In comparison to most of 2021 blockchain technologies that have focused on financial industries and cryptocurrencies, Ethereum has focused on decentralizing applications within many different industries. This thesis provides three Ethereum based blockchain protocol solutions and one operating system for these protocols. All have different features that add to the base blockchain technology but after extensive comparison two of these protocols perform better in means of concurrency and privacy. Hyperledger Fabric and Quorum provide many ways of tackling privacy, concurrency and parallel execution issues with consistent high throughput levels. However Hyperledger Fabric has far better throughput and concurrency management. This makes the solution of Firefly operating system with Hyperledger Fabric blockchain protocol the most preferable solution in complex remote pilotage fairway environment

On the Security and Performance of Blockchain Sharding

In this paper, we perform a comprehensive evaluation on blockchain sharding protocols. We deconstruct the blockchain sharding protocol into four foundational layers with orthogonal functionalities, securing some properties. We evaluate each layer of seven state-of-the-art blockchain sharding protocols, and identify a considerable number of new attacks, questionable design trade-offs and some open challenges. The layered evaluation allows us to unveil security and performance problems arising from a fundamental design choice, namely the coherence of system settings across layers. In particular, most sharded blockchains use different trust and synchrony assumptions across layers, without corresponding architectural guarantees. Unless a hybrid architecture were used, assuming differentiated system settings across layers can introduce subtle but severe failure syndromes or reduce the system’s performance

Snapshot : friend or foe of data management - on optimizing transaction processing in database and blockchain systems

Data management is a complicated task. Due to a wide range of data management tasks, businesses often need a sophisticated data management infrastructure with a plethora of distinct systems to fulfill their requirements. Moreover, since snapshot is an essential ingredient in solving many data management tasks such as checkpointing and recovery, they have been widely exploited in almost all major data management systems that have appeared in recent years. However, snapshots do not always guarantee exceptional performance. In this dissertation, we will see two different faces of the snapshot, one where it has a tremendous positive impact on the performance and usability of the system, and another where an incorrect usage of the snapshot might have a significant negative impact on the performance of the system. This dissertation consists of three loosely-coupled parts that represent three distinct projects that emerged during this doctoral research. In the first part, we analyze the importance of utilizing snapshots in relational database systems. We identify the bottlenecks in state-of-the-art snapshotting algorithms, propose two snapshotting techniques, and optimize the multi-version concurrency control for handling hybrid workloads effectively. Our snapshotting algorithm is up to 100x faster and reduces the latency of analytical queries by up to 4x in comparison to the state-of-the-art techniques. In the second part, we recognize strict snapshotting used by Fabric as a critical bottleneck, and replace it with MVCC and propose some additional optimizations to improve the throughput of the permissioned-blockchain system by up to 12x under highly contended workloads. In the last part, we propose ChainifyDB, a platform that transforms an existing database infrastructure into a blockchain infrastructure. ChainifyDB achieves up to 6x higher throughput in comparison to another state-of-the-art permissioned blockchain system. Furthermore, its external concurrency control protocol outperforms the internal concurrency control protocol of PostgreSQL and MySQL, achieving up to 2.6x higher throughput in a blockchain setup in comparison to a standalone isolated setup. We also utilize snapshots in ChainifyDB to support recovery, which has been missing so far from the permissioned-blockchain world.Datenverwaltung ist eine komplizierte Aufgabe. Aufgrund der vielfältigen Aufgaben im Bereich der Datenverwaltung benötigen Unternehmen häufig eine anspruchsvolle Infrastruktur mit einer Vielzahl an unterschiedlichen Systemen, um ihre Anforderungen zu erfüllen. Dabei ist Snapshotting ein wesentlicher Bestandteil in nahezu allen aktuellen Datenbanksystemen, um Probleme wie Checkpointing und Recovery zu lösen. Allerdings garantieren Snapshots nicht immer eine gute Performance. In dieser Arbeit werden wir zwei Facetten des Snapshots beleuchten: Einerseits können Snapshots enorm positive Auswirkungen auf die Performance und Usability des Systems haben, andererseits können sie bei falscher Anwendung zu erheblichen Performanceverlusten führen. Diese Dissertation besteht aus drei Teilen basierend auf drei unterschiedlichen Projekten, die im Rahmen der Forschung zu dieser Arbeit entstanden sind. Im ersten Teil untersuchen wir die Bedeutung von Snapshots in relationalen Datenbanksystemen. Wir identifizieren die Bottlenecks gegenwärtiger Snapshottingalgorithmen, stellen zwei leichtgewichtige Snapshottingverfahren vor und optimieren Multi- Version Concurrency Control f¨ur das effiziente Ausführen hybrider Workloads. Unser Snapshottingalgorithmus ist bis zu 100 mal schneller und verringert die Latenz analytischer Anfragen um bis zu Faktor vier gegenüber dem Stand der Technik. Im zweiten Teil identifizieren wir striktes Snapshotting als Bottleneck von Fabric. In Folge dessen ersetzen wir es durch MVCC und schlagen weitere Optimierungen vor, mit denen der Durchsatz des Permissioned Blockchain Systems unter hoher Arbeitslast um Faktor zwölf verbessert werden kann. Im letzten Teil stellen wir ChainifyDB vor, eine Platform die eine existierende Datenbankinfrastruktur in eine Blockchaininfrastruktur überführt. ChainifyDB erreicht dabei einen bis zu sechs mal höheren Durchsatz im Vergleich zu anderen aktuellen Systemen, die auf Permissioned Blockchains basieren. Das externe Concurrency Protokoll übertrifft dabei sogar die internen Varianten von PostgreSQL und MySQL und erreicht einen bis zu 2,6 mal höhren Durchsatz im Blockchain Setup als in einem eigenständigen isolierten Setup. Zusätzlich verwenden wir Snapshots in ChainifyDB zur Unterstützung von Recovery, was bisher im Rahmen von Permissioned Blockchains nicht möglich war

A theory of transaction parallelism in blockchains

Decentralized blockchain platforms have enabled the secure exchange of crypto-assets without the intermediation of trusted authorities. To this purpose, these platforms rely on a peer-to-peer network of byzantine nodes, which collaboratively maintain an append-only ledger of transactions, called blockchain. Transactions represent the actions required by users, e.g. the transfer of some units of crypto-currency to another user, or the execution of a smart contract which distributes crypto-assets according to its internal logic. Part of the nodes of the peer-to-peer network compete to append transactions to the blockchain. To do so, they group the transactions sent by users into blocks, and update their view of the blockchain state by executing these transactions in the chosen order. Once a block of transactions is appended to the blockchain, the other nodes validate it, re-executing the transactions in the same order. The serial execution of transactions does not take advantage of the multi-core architecture of modern processors, so contributing to limit the throughput. In this paper we develop a theory of transaction parallelism for blockchains, which is based on static analysis of transactions and smart contracts. We illustrate how blockchain nodes can use our theory to parallelize the execution of transactions. Initial experiments on Ethereum show that our technique can improve the performance of nodes.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1905.0436

SoK: Communication Across Distributed Ledgers

Since the inception of Bitcoin, a plethora of distributed ledgers differing in design and purpose has been created. While by design, blockchains provide no means to securely communicate with external systems, numerous attempts towards trustless cross-chain communication have been proposed over the years. Today, cross-chain communication (CCC) plays a fundamental role in cryptocurrency exchanges, scalability efforts via sharding, extension of existing systems through sidechains, and bootstrapping of new blockchains. Unfortunately, existing proposals are designed ad-hoc for specific use-cases, making it hard to gain confidence in their correctness and composability. We provide the first systematic exposition of cross-chain communication protocols. We formalize the underlying research problem and show that CCC is impossible without a trusted third party, contrary to common beliefs in the blockchain community. With this result in mind, we develop a framework to design new and evaluate existing CCC protocols, focusing on the inherent trust assumptions thereof, and derive a classification covering the field of cross-chain communication to date. We conclude by discussing open challenges for CCC research and the implications of interoperability on the security and privacy of blockchains