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2020 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Generic Superlight Client for Permissionless Blockchains

Authors : Yuan Lu, Qiang Tang, Guiling Wang

Published in: Computer Security – ESORICS 2020

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

We initiate a systematic study on the light-client protocol of permissionless blockchains, in the setting where full nodes and light clients are rational. In the game-theoretic model, we design a superlight-client protocol to enable a light client to employ some relaying full nodes (e.g., two or one) to read the blockchain. The protocol is “generic”, i.e., it can be deployed disregarding underlying consensuses, and it is also “superlight”, i.e., the computational cost of the light client to predicate the (non)existence of a transaction in the blockchain becomes a small constant. Since our protocol resolves a fundamental challenge of broadening the usage of blockchain technology, it captures a wide variety of important use-cases such as multi-chain wallets, DApp browsers and more.

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previous chapter 2-hop Blockchain: Combining Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake Securely

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Writing in the blockchain is trivial, as one can gossip with some full nodes to diffuse its messages to the entire blockchain network (a.k.a., network diffuse functionality [4, 22]). Then the blockchain’s liveness ensures the inclusion of the messages [22].

Note that the case of one relay can model the pessimistic scenario that all recruited full nodes are colluding to form a single coalition.

Remark that the above modeling requires the block hashes can be read by smart contracts from the blockchain’s internal states (e.g. available global variables) [20]. In Ethereum, this currently can be realized via the proposal of Andrew Miller [45] and will be incorporated due to the already-planned Ethereum enhancement EIP-210 [2].

Remark that in the full paper [42], we define another class of chain predicates whose falseness is provable instead of trueness, which can captured by our protocol as well, though we omit detailed discussions here for presentation simplicity.

Such assumption can be granted if considering the client and the relays can set up private communication channels on demand. In practice, this can be done because (i) the client can “broadcast” its network address via the blockchain [43], or (ii) there is a trusted name service that tracks the network addresses of the relays.

Remark that due to the notion of \(\epsilon \)-sequential equilibrium, the rational game players are not sensitive for any utility increments that are less than \(\epsilon \).

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Title: Generic Superlight Client for Permissionless Blockchains
Authors: Yuan Lu
Qiang Tang
Guiling Wang
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Computer Security – ESORICS 2020
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-59012-3

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-59013-0

Copyright Year: 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59013-0_35

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