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A Secure Sharding Protocol For Open Blockchains

Authors:

Viswesh Narayanan,

Chaodong Zheng,

Prateek SaxenaAuthors Info & Claims

CCS '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Pages 17 - 30

https://doi.org/10.1145/2976749.2978389

Published: 24 October 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and 250 similar alt-coins, embody at their core a blockchain protocol --- a mechanism for a distributed network of computational nodes to periodically agree on a set of new transactions. Designing a secure blockchain protocol relies on an open challenge in security, that of designing a highly-scalable agreement protocol open to manipulation by byzantine or arbitrarily malicious nodes. Bitcoin's blockchain agreement protocol exhibits security, but does not scale: it processes 3--7 transactions per second at present, irrespective of the available computation capacity at hand.

In this paper, we propose a new distributed agreement protocol for permission-less blockchains called ELASTICO. ELASTICO scales transaction rates almost linearly with available computation for mining: the more the computation power in the network, the higher the number of transaction blocks selected per unit time. ELASTICO is efficient in its network messages and tolerates byzantine adversaries of up to one-fourth of the total computational power. Technically, ELASTICO uniformly partitions or parallelizes the mining network (securely) into smaller committees, each of which processes a disjoint set of transactions (or "shards"). While sharding is common in non-byzantine settings, ELASTICO is the first candidate for a secure sharding protocol with presence of byzantine adversaries. Our scalability experiments on Amazon EC2 with up to $1, 600$ nodes confirm ELASTICO's theoretical scaling properties.

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Index Terms

A Secure Sharding Protocol For Open Blockchains
1. Security and privacy
  1. Network security
    1. Security protocols
  2. Systems security
    1. Distributed systems security

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cover image ACM Conferences

CCS '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

October 2016

1924 pages

ISBN:9781450341394

DOI:10.1145/2976749

General Chairs:
Edgar Weippl
SBA Research, Austria
,
Stefan Katzenbeisser
TU Darmstadt, CYSEC, Germany
,
Program Chairs:
Christopher Kruegel
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
,
Andrew Myers
Cornell University, USA
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Shai Halevi
IBM Research, USA

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Published: 24 October 2016

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CCS'16: 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

October 24 - 28, 2016

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CCS '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 137 of 831 submissions, 16%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,261 of 6,999 submissions, 18%

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https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3693-3956-5.ch009
Jiang TLuo HYang KSun GYu HHuang QVasilakos A(2025)Blockchain for energy market: A comprehensive surveySustainable Energy, Grids and Networks10.1016/j.segan.2024.10161441(101614)Online publication date: Mar-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.segan.2024.101614
Zhao CZhang SWang TLiew S(2025)Bodyless block propagation: TPS fully scalable blockchain with pre-validationFuture Generation Computer Systems10.1016/j.future.2024.107516163(107516)Online publication date: Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2024.107516
Ding YWu ZMiao YDing M(2025)SharAcc: Enhancing scalability and security in Attribute-Based Access Control with sharding-based blockchain and full decentralizationComputer Networks10.1016/j.comnet.2024.110992257(110992)Online publication date: Feb-2025
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