LightChain: A DHT-based Blockchain for Resource Constrained Environments

Yahya Hassanzadeh-Nazarabadi; Alptekin Küpçü; Öznur Özkasap

Paper 2019/342

LightChain: A DHT-based Blockchain for Resource Constrained Environments

Yahya Hassanzadeh-Nazarabadi, Alptekin Küpçü, and Öznur Özkasap

Abstract

As an append-only distributed database, blockchain is utilized in a vast variety of applications including the cryptocurrency and Internet-of-Things (IoT). The existing blockchain solutions have downsides in communication and storage efficiency, convergence to centralization, and consistency problems. In this paper, we propose LightChain, which is the first blockchain architecture that operates over a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) of participating peers. LightChain is a permissionless blockchain that provides addressable blocks and transactions within the network, which makes them efficiently accessible by all the peers. Each block and transaction is replicated within the DHT of peers and is retrieved in an on-demand manner. Hence, peers in LightChain are not required to retrieve or keep the entire blockchain. LightChain is fair as all of the participating peers have a uniform chance of being involved in the consensus regardless of their influence such as hashing power or stake. LightChain provides a deterministic fork-resolving strategy as well as a blacklisting mechanism, and it is secure against colluding adversarial peers attacking the availability and integrity of the system. We provide mathematical analysis and experimental results on scenarios involving 10K nodes to demonstrate the security and fairness of LightChain.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Publication info: Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords: Blockchain Permissionless DHT Consensus Storage Efficiency Communication Efficiency Scalability Skip Graph.
Contact author(s): yhassanzadeh13 @ ku edu tr
History: 2019-04-03: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2019/342
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2019/342,
      author = {Yahya Hassanzadeh-Nazarabadi and Alptekin Küpçü and Öznur Özkasap},
      title = {{LightChain}: A {DHT}-based Blockchain for Resource Constrained Environments},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2019/342},
      year = {2019},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/342}
}