A flexible n/2 adversary node resistant and halting recoverable blockchain sharding protocol

Xu, Yibin, Huang, Yangyu, Shao, Jianhua ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8461-1471 and Theodorakopoulos, Georgios ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2701-7809 2020. A flexible n/2 adversary node resistant and halting recoverable blockchain sharding protocol. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience 32 (19) , e5773. 10.1002/cpe.5773

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Abstract

Blockchain sharding is a promising approach to solving the dilemma between decentralisation and high performance (transaction throughput) for blockchain. The main challenge of Blockchain sharding systems is how to reach a decision on a statement among a sub-group (shard) of people while ensuring the whole population recognises this statement. Namely, the challenge is to prevent an adversary who does not have the majority of nodes globally but have the majority of nodes inside a shard. Most Blockchain sharding approaches can only reach a correct consensus inside a shard with at most $n/3$ evil nodes in a $n$ node system. There is a blockchain sharding approach which can prevent an incorrect decision to be reached when the adversary does not have $n/2$ nodes globally. However, the system can be stopped from reaching consensus (become deadlocked) if the adversary controls a smaller number of nodes. In this paper, we present an improved Blockchain sharding approach that can withstand $n/2$ adversarial nodes and recover from deadlocks. The recovery is made by dynamically adjusting the number of shards and the shard size. A performance analysis suggests our approach has a high performance (transaction throughput) while requiring little bandwidth for synchronisation.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Computer Science & Informatics
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software
Publisher:	Wiley
ISSN:	1532-0626
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	25 March 2020
Date of Acceptance:	26 February 2020
Last Modified:	02 May 2023 17:21
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/130518

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