Practical Light Clients for Committee-Based Blockchains

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Armknecht, Frederik, Karame, Ghassan, Mohamed, Malcom, Weis, Christiane
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Armknecht, Frederik
Karame, Ghassan
Mohamed, Malcom
Weis, Christiane
author_facet Armknecht, Frederik
Karame, Ghassan
Mohamed, Malcom
Weis, Christiane
contents Light clients are gaining increasing attention in the literature since they obviate the need for users to set up dedicated blockchain full nodes. While the literature features a number of light client instantiations, most light client protocols optimize for long offline phases and implicitly assume that the block headers to be verified are signed by highly dynamic validators. In this paper, we show that (i) most light clients are rarely offline for more than a week, and (ii) validators are unlikely to drastically change in most permissioned blockchains and in a number of permissionless blockchains, such as Cosmos and Polkadot. Motivated by these findings, we propose a novel practical system that optimizes for such realistic assumptions and achieves minimal communication and computational costs for light clients when compared to existing protocols. By means of a prototype implementation of our solution, we show that our protocol achieves a reduction by up to $90$ and $40000\times$ (respectively) in end-to-end latency and up to $1000$ and $10000\times$ (respectively) smaller proof size when compared to two state-of-the-art light client instantiations from the literature.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_03347
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Practical Light Clients for Committee-Based Blockchains
Armknecht, Frederik
Karame, Ghassan
Mohamed, Malcom
Weis, Christiane
Cryptography and Security
Light clients are gaining increasing attention in the literature since they obviate the need for users to set up dedicated blockchain full nodes. While the literature features a number of light client instantiations, most light client protocols optimize for long offline phases and implicitly assume that the block headers to be verified are signed by highly dynamic validators. In this paper, we show that (i) most light clients are rarely offline for more than a week, and (ii) validators are unlikely to drastically change in most permissioned blockchains and in a number of permissionless blockchains, such as Cosmos and Polkadot. Motivated by these findings, we propose a novel practical system that optimizes for such realistic assumptions and achieves minimal communication and computational costs for light clients when compared to existing protocols. By means of a prototype implementation of our solution, we show that our protocol achieves a reduction by up to $90$ and $40000\times$ (respectively) in end-to-end latency and up to $1000$ and $10000\times$ (respectively) smaller proof size when compared to two state-of-the-art light client instantiations from the literature.
title Practical Light Clients for Committee-Based Blockchains
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.03347