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FleetChain: A Secure Scalable and Responsive Blockchain Achieving Optimal Sharding

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Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing (ICA3PP 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 12454))

Abstract

Sharding blockchains are promising in improving transaction throughput and achieving network scalability. Intra-shard consensus and cross-shard communication are two essential parts for almost every kind of sharding blockchain. However, some security problems still exist in current sharding solutions such as replay attacks, and there is still room for improvement in efficiency.

In this paper, we propose FleetChain, a secure and scalable sharding blockchain. First, we make modification of the original BLS multi-signature scheme to a robust (t, u)-multi-signature protocol supporting further aggregation, which could shorten vote messages. Second, a leader-stable fast Byzantine fault tolerance (\(\mathtt {FBFT}\)) protocol is designed for efficient intra-shard consensus, combining pipeline technology and multi-signature. \(\mathtt {FBFT}\) is specially designed for sharding blockchains, with the ability to process different types of proposals that might be transactions or transaction inputs. Third, a responsive sharding transaction processing (\(\mathtt {RSTP}\)) protocol is given, which greatly improves the processing efficiency of cross-shard transactions by using multi-signature aggregation. FleetChain employs a star network in both intra-shard and cross-shard communication, achieving responsiveness when confirming transactions. In addition, FleetChain achieves optimal sharding with a scaling factor of \(O(n/\log n)\) where n denotes the total number of participating nodes.

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Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Prof. Fritz Henglein and Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles for their valuable comments. This paper is supported by the National Key R&D Program of China through project 2017YFB1400702 and 2017YFB0802500, the National Cryptography Development Fund through project MMJJ20170106, the Natural Science Foundation of China through projects 61932014, 61972018, 61972019, 61932011, 61772538, 61672083, 61532021, 61472429, 91646203, 61402029, 61972017, 61972310, the foundation of Science and Technology on Information Assurance Laboratory through project 61421120305162112006, the China Scholarship Council through project 201906020015.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China

    Yizhong Liu & Hui Yu

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

    Jianwei Liu, Dawei Li & Qianhong Wu

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Yizhong Liu

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  1. Yizhong Liu
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  2. Jianwei Liu
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  3. Dawei Li
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  4. Hui Yu
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  5. Qianhong Wu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dawei Li .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Meikang Qiu

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Liu, Y., Liu, J., Li, D., Yu, H., Wu, Q. (2020). FleetChain: A Secure Scalable and Responsive Blockchain Achieving Optimal Sharding. In: Qiu, M. (eds) Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing. ICA3PP 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12454. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60248-2_28

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