Paper 2020/844

Generic Superlight Client for Permissionless Blockchains

Yuan Lu, Qiang Tang, and Guiling Wang

Abstract

We conduct 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.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Minor revision. An abridged version of this paper will appear in the 25th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS) 2020.
Keywords
Blockchainlight clientgame-theoretic security
Contact author(s)
yylluu @ outlook com
qiang @ njit edu
gwang @ njit edu
History
2020-07-12: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2020/844
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2020/844,
      author = {Yuan Lu and Qiang Tang and Guiling Wang},
      title = {Generic Superlight Client for Permissionless Blockchains},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2020/844},
      year = {2020},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/844}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/844}
}
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