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Towards Secure and Scalable Blockchain Technologies

Published: 25 May 2021 Publication History

Abstract

The blockchain technology is rapidly gaining grounds as a key technology, especially in the financial and supply chain management sectors. This is largely due to the ability of the technology to (i) efficiently manage the sharing of digital resources between a large number of stakeholders and (ii) to efficiently manage disputes arising in the process. In spite of its many advantages, experience with existing blockchain proposals reveals that there are still many challenges that need to be overcome prior to any large scale industrial adoption, namely [Scalability] Existing permissionless blockchains (e.g., Bitcoin) are able to scale to a considerable number of nodes at the expense of attained throughput (e.g., Bitcoin can only achieve few transactions per second[2]). On the other hand, permission-based blockchains can achieve relatively higher throughput, but can only scale to few hundred nodes. However, one needs to cater for both performance and scalability to meet industrial standards. [Privacy of lightweight clients] Most open blockchain platforms support lightweight clients, targeted for devices like smartphones, that only download and verify a small part of the chain. Here, clients connect to a full node that has access to the complete blockchain and can assist the client in transaction confirmation. As the full node has to learn all transactions issued and received by the requesting client to verify their correctness, such action obviously violates user privacy[1]. In this talk, we plan to overview a number of security challenges pertaining to existing blockchains-effectively capturing almost 8 years of research in this area of work. Moreover, we plan to discuss the performance limitations of existing blockchain-based consensus algorithms and explore different concepts leveraging trusted execution environments (TEEs) to enhance the scalability and security of existing consensus algorithms[3]. Finally, we will discuss the privacy provisions of existing lightweight client implementations and explore the solution space to enhance user privacy by leveraging functionality from TEEs[4].

References

[1]
Arthur Gervais, Srdjan Capkun, Ghassan O. Karame, and Damian Gruber. 2014. On the privacy provisions of Bloom filters in lightweight bitcoin clients. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC 2014, New Orleans, LA, USA, December 8--12, 2014. 326--335. https://doi.org/10.1145/2664243.2664267
[2]
Arthur Gervais, Ghassan O. Karame, Karl Wüst, Vasileios Glykantzis, Hubert Ritzdorf, and Srdjan Capkun. 2016. On the Security and Performance of Proof of Work Blockchains. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Vienna, Austria, October 24--28, 2016, Edgar R. Weippl, Stefan Katzenbeisser, Christopher Kruegel, Andrew C. Myers, and Shai Halevi (Eds.). ACM, 3--16. https://doi.org/10.1145/2976749.2978341
[3]
Jian Liu, Wenting Li, Ghassan O. Karame, and N. Asokan. 2019. Scalable Byzantine Consensus via Hardware-Assisted Secret Sharing. IEEE Trans. Computers, Vol. 68, 1 (2019), 139--151. https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2018.2860009
[4]
Sinisa Matetic, Karl Wü st, Moritz Schneider, Kari Kostiainen, Ghassan Karame, and Srdjan Capkun. 2019. BITE: Bitcoin Lightweight Client Privacy using Trusted Execution. In 28th USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX Security 2019, Santa Clara, CA, USA, August 14--16, 2019, Nadia Heninger and Patrick Traynor (Eds.). USENIX Association, 783--800. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity19/presentation/matetic

Cited By

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  • (2024)Framework for Evaluation of Authentication and Proof-of-Event mechanisms in Smart Contracts2024 IEEE 12th International Conference on Intelligent Systems (IS)10.1109/IS61756.2024.10705211(1-10)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Unravelling Ethical Dimensions in Blockchain Technology: A Comprehensive Analysis2024 4th Interdisciplinary Conference on Electrics and Computer (INTCEC)10.1109/INTCEC61833.2024.10603151(1-7)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2024

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cover image ACM Conferences
SBC '21: Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Security in Blockchain and Cloud Computing
May 2021
40 pages
ISBN:9781450384056
DOI:10.1145/3457977
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Publication History

Published: 25 May 2021

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  1. blockchain security
  2. lightweight client privacy
  3. trusted execution environments

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View all
  • (2024)Framework for Evaluation of Authentication and Proof-of-Event mechanisms in Smart Contracts2024 IEEE 12th International Conference on Intelligent Systems (IS)10.1109/IS61756.2024.10705211(1-10)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Unravelling Ethical Dimensions in Blockchain Technology: A Comprehensive Analysis2024 4th Interdisciplinary Conference on Electrics and Computer (INTCEC)10.1109/INTCEC61833.2024.10603151(1-7)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2024

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