You Sank My Battleship! A Case Study to Evaluate State Channels as a Scaling Solution for Cryptocurrencies

McCorry, Patrick; Buckland, Chris; Bakshi, Surya; Wüst, Karl; Miller, Andrew

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-43725-1_4

Cited by 18 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…It is pointed out by McCorry et al. 183 that such proofs may involve a large amount of data, which will result in high transaction fees. That means an honest party has to pay for the misbehavior of malicious parties.…”

Section: Executing Smart Contractsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A comprehensive survey on smart contract construction and execution: paradigms, tools, and systems

Zhang

Liu

et al. 2021

Patterns

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Summary Smart contracts are regarded as one of the most promising and appealing notions in blockchain technology. Their self-enforcing and event-driven features make some online activities possible without a trusted third party. Nevertheless, problems such as miscellaneous attacks, privacy leakage, and low processing rates prevent them from being widely applied. Various schemes and tools have been proposed to facilitate the construction and execution of secure smart contracts. However, a comprehensive survey for these proposals is absent, hindering new researchers and developers from a quick start. This paper surveys the literature and online resources on smart contract construction and execution over the period 2008–2020. We divide the studies into three categories: (1) design paradigms that give examples and patterns on contract construction, (2) design tools that facilitate the development of secure smart contracts, and (3) extensions and alternatives that improve the privacy or efficiency of the system. We start by grouping the relevant construction schemes into the first two categories. We then review the execution mechanisms in the last category and further divide the state-of-the-art solutions into three classes: private contracts with extra tools, off-chain channels, and extensions on core functionalities. Finally, we summarize several challenges and identify future research directions toward developing secure, privacy-preserving, and efficient smart contracts.

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Section: Executing Smart Contractsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A comprehensive survey on smart contract construction and execution: paradigms, tools, and systems

Zhang

Liu

et al. 2021

Patterns

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“…Additionally, blockchain technology leaks information regarding transactions, as all the information in the system is publicly accessible, such as the details of transactions and the balances [16,17]. One viable solution to increase the scalability of blockchain is off-chain resolution [19]; it also includes the protection of sensitive information through off-chain processing [25].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The delay results in high latency, which is unsustainable when a transaction needs to be completed in milliseconds instead of every hour [10]. An off-chain resolution is considered as it provides a verifiable, real-time solution: an off-chain solution enhances the scalability of the energy market, increasing the security and the privacy of the model [18,19].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

P2PEdge: A Decentralised, Scalable P2P Architecture for Energy Trading in Real-Time

et al. 2021

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Current Peer-to-Peer (P2P) energy market models raise serious concerns regarding the confidentiality and integrity of energy consumption, trading and billing data. While Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) systems (e.g., blockchain) have been proposed to enhance security, an attacker could damage other parts of the model, such as its infrastructure: an adversarial attacker could target the communication between entities by, e.g., eavesdropping or modifying data. The main goal of this paper is to propose a model for a decentralised P2P marketplace for trading energy, which addresses the problem of developing security and privacy-aware environments. Additionally, a Multi-Agent System (MAS) architecture is presented with a focus on security and sustainability. In order to propose a solution to DLT’s scalability issues (i.e., through transaction confirmation delays), off-chain state channels are considered for the energy negotiation and resolution processes. Additionally, a STRIDE (spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, denial of service, elevation of privilege) security analysis is conducted within the context of the proposed model to identify potential vulnerabilities.

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“…State channels [33], [21], [22], [32] constitute another approach to move on-chain execution of smart contracts off the chain. However, such constructions require fallback mechanisms and joining procedures that rely on on-chain execution.…”

Section: B Limitations Of Previous Solutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bitcontracts: Supporting Smart Contracts in Legacy Blockchains

Wüst

Diana²,

Kostiainen

et al. 2021

Proceedings 2021 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium

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In this paper, our main goal is to design a solution that adds expressive smart contract execution support as a subsystem to existing legacy blockchain systems. The primary usage of our solution is to enhance systems like Bitcoin that have no built-in smart contract capabilities. The secondary usage is to extend the contract execution capabilities of platforms like Ethereum that support contracts but have severe limitations on the complexity of allowed computations. Previous work. Recent research has explored different ways to add contract execution capabilities to blockchains. For instance, Arbitrum [25] and ACE [50] use off-chain execution models, where contract issuers appoint a set of managers who are responsible for executing the contract and communicating the results back to the chain. Hyperledger Fabric [5] uses a similar model in a permissioned setting with an execute-order-validate architecture in which transactions are executed before ordering. The main drawback of such solutions is that they are newly purpose-built systems, and therefore such systems cannot be deployed on legacy systems without modifying the underlying blockchain. Another proposal, FastKitten [16], relies on enclaved execution and collaterals, but only supports short-lived contracts that are restricted to known participants. In addition, such a system cannot tolerate enclave compromise. Recently discovered attacks [11], [45], [29], [13], [44] have shown that TEE compromise is a relevant threat. We discuss the limitations of previous solutions in more detail in Section II-B. Our solution. In this paper, we propose a novel system called Bitcontracts that adds expressive smart contract execution capabilities to legacy cryptocurrencies without requiring protocol changes to the legacy system, and overcomes the main limitations of previous solutions.

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You Sank My Battleship! A Case Study to Evaluate State Channels as a Scaling Solution for Cryptocurrencies

Cited by 18 publications

References 7 publications

A comprehensive survey on smart contract construction and execution: paradigms, tools, and systems

A comprehensive survey on smart contract construction and execution: paradigms, tools, and systems

P2PEdge: A Decentralised, Scalable P2P Architecture for Energy Trading in Real-Time

Bitcontracts: Supporting Smart Contracts in Legacy Blockchains

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