TY - GEN
T1 - TrustBoost
T2 - 30th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2023
AU - Sheng, Peiyao
AU - Wang, Xuechao
AU - Kannan, Sreeram
AU - Nayak, Kartik
AU - Viswanath, Pramod
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.
PY - 2023/11/15
Y1 - 2023/11/15
N2 - Currently there exist many blockchains with weak trust guarantees, limiting applications and participation. Existing solutions to boost the trust using a stronger blockchain, e.g., via checkpointing, requires the weaker blockchain to give up sovereignty. In this paper, we propose a family of protocols in which multiple blockchains interact to create a combined ledger with boosted trust. We show that even if several of the interacting blockchains cease to provide security guarantees, the combined ledger continues to be secure - our TrustBoost protocols achieve the optimal threshold of tolerating the insecure blockchains. This optimality, along with the necessity of blockchain interactions, is formally shown within the classic shared memory model, tackling the long standing open challenge of solving consensus in the presence of both Byzantine objects and processes. Furthermore, our proposed construction of TrustBoost simply operates via smart contracts and require no change to the underlying consensus protocols of the participating blockchains, a form of “consensus on top of consensus”. The protocols are lightweight and can be used on specific (e.g., high value) transactions; we demonstrate the practicality by implementing and deploying TrustBoost as cross-chain smart contracts in the Cosmos ecosystem using approximately 3,000 lines of Rust code, made available as open source [52]. Our evaluation shows that using 10 Cosmos chains in a local testnet, TrustBoost has a gas cost of roughly $2 with a latency of 2 minutes per request, which is in line with the cost on a high security chain such as Bitcoin or Ethereum.
AB - Currently there exist many blockchains with weak trust guarantees, limiting applications and participation. Existing solutions to boost the trust using a stronger blockchain, e.g., via checkpointing, requires the weaker blockchain to give up sovereignty. In this paper, we propose a family of protocols in which multiple blockchains interact to create a combined ledger with boosted trust. We show that even if several of the interacting blockchains cease to provide security guarantees, the combined ledger continues to be secure - our TrustBoost protocols achieve the optimal threshold of tolerating the insecure blockchains. This optimality, along with the necessity of blockchain interactions, is formally shown within the classic shared memory model, tackling the long standing open challenge of solving consensus in the presence of both Byzantine objects and processes. Furthermore, our proposed construction of TrustBoost simply operates via smart contracts and require no change to the underlying consensus protocols of the participating blockchains, a form of “consensus on top of consensus”. The protocols are lightweight and can be used on specific (e.g., high value) transactions; we demonstrate the practicality by implementing and deploying TrustBoost as cross-chain smart contracts in the Cosmos ecosystem using approximately 3,000 lines of Rust code, made available as open source [52]. Our evaluation shows that using 10 Cosmos chains in a local testnet, TrustBoost has a gas cost of roughly $2 with a latency of 2 minutes per request, which is in line with the cost on a high security chain such as Bitcoin or Ethereum.
KW - consensus
KW - cross-chain interoperability
KW - smart contracts
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85179855088&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85179855088&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3576915.3623080
DO - 10.1145/3576915.3623080
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85179855088
T3 - CCS 2023 - Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
SP - 1571
EP - 1584
BT - CCS 2023 - Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 26 November 2023 through 30 November 2023
ER -