On Improving Scalability of Blockchain Systems Using Coding and Redundancy Methods

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Badihi, Ahmad Reza | 2020

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Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
Language: Farsi
Document No: 52676 (19)
University: Sharif University of Technology
Department: Computer Engineering
Advisor(s): Motahhari, Abolfazl; Maddah Ali, Mohammad Ali
Abstract:
Blockchains are not scalable by design, and it is known to be the most important barrier in the way of development of these systems. One of the main approaches to this problem is sharding, that is under development in industry and academia. Sharding scales the system up by reducing redundancy, that makes blockchains vulnerable in terms of security. In this paper, we will study the effect of sharding on availability of these systems, and will show that sharding can magnify the unavailability of the service, and introduce an adversary threat model that takes real concerns of availability in today’s Internet like DoS attacks into account. We also introduce a basic unavailability-resistant scheme for sharded blockchains that tries to achieve scalability in intended parameters of performance, i.e. security, storage efficiency and under-attack locality, and will show the trade-offs between these parameters
Keywords:
Distributed Storage ; Coding ; Blockchain Scalability ; Consensus Algorithms ; Code Redundancy