Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

SoK: Communication Across Distributed Ledgers

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 12675))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Since the inception of Bitcoin, a plethora of distributed ledgers differing in design and purpose has been created. While by design, blockchains provide no means to securely communicate with external systems, numerous attempts towards trustless cross-chain communication have been proposed over the years. Today, cross-chain communication (CCC) plays a fundamental role in cryptocurrency exchanges, scalability efforts via sharding, extension of existing systems through sidechains, and bootstrapping of new blockchains. Unfortunately, existing proposals are designed ad-hoc for specific use-cases, making it hard to gain confidence in their correctness and composability. We provide the first systematic exposition of cross-chain communication protocols.

We formalize the underlying research problem and show that CCC is impossible without a trusted third party, contrary to common beliefs in the blockchain community. With this result in mind, we develop a framework to design new and evaluate existing CCC protocols, focusing on the inherent trust assumptions thereof, and derive a classification covering the field of cross-chain communication to date. We conclude by discussing open challenges for CCC research and the implications of interoperability on the security and privacy of blockchains.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. 1.

    In case of Proof-of-Work or Proof-of-Stake blockchains, the majority pertains to computational power [131] or stake [105] respectively.

  2. 2.

    In off-chain protocols [85], the commitment can be done by exchanging pre-signed transactions or channel states, which will be written to the ledger at a later point.

  3. 3.

    The full version of this paper is available at https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1128.pdf.

References

  1. Binance exchange. Online. https://www.binance.com/en. Accessed 19 Sep 2020

  2. Bitcoin Wiki: Hashed Time-Lock Contracts. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hashed_Timelock_Contracts. Accessed 02 Apr 2021

  3. Btcrelay. https://github.com/ethereum/btcrelay. Accessed 02 Apr 2021

  4. Chainlink: A decentralized oracle network. Online. https://link.smartcontract.com/whitepaper. Accessed 19 Sep 2020

  5. Confirmations. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Confirmation. Accessed 02 Apr 2021

  6. Ethereum contract allowing ether to be obtained with bitcoin. https://github.com/ethers/EthereumBitcoinSwap. Accessed 02 Apr 2021

  7. Polkabtc: Trustless bitcoin on polkadot. Online. https://github.com/interlay/BTC-Parachain. Accessed 19 Sep 2020

  8. tbtc: A decentralized redeemable btc-backed erc-20 token. http://docs.keep.network/tbtc/index.pdf. Accessed 02 Apr 2021

  9. Top cryptocurrency decentralized exchanges. Online. https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/dex/. Accessed 02 Apr 2021

  10. Why does ethereum use secp256k1?

    Google Scholar 

  11. Wrapped bitcoin. https://www.wbtc.network/assets/wrapped-tokens-whitepaper.pdf. Accessed 02 Apr 2021

  12. Alt chains and atomic transfers. bitcointalk.org (2013). https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=193281.msg2003765#msg2003765. Accessed 02 Apr 2021

  13. Atomic swap. Bitcoin Wiki (2013). https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Atomic_swap. Accessed 02 Apr 2021

  14. Wanchain whitepaper (2017). https://www.wanchain.org/files/Wanchain-Whitepaper-EN-version.pdf. Accessed 02 Apr 2021

  15. Submarine swaps service. Online (2018). https://github.com/submarineswaps/swaps-service. Accessed 02 Apr 2021

  16. Inter-blockchain communication protocol (ibc) specification. Online (2019). https://github.com/cosmos/ics/tree/master/ibc. Accessed 02 Apr 2021

  17. Bitcoin on ethereum. Online (2020). https://defipulse.com/btc

  18. Bitcoin supply on ethereum tops \$1b. Coindesk, September 2020. https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-supply-on-ethereum-tops-1b

  19. Lightning loop. Online (2020). https://github.com/lightninglabs/loop. Accessed 02 Apr 2021

  20. Ptokens: How it works. Online (2020). https://ptokens.io/how-it-works. Accessed 19 Sep 2020

  21. Renvm. Online (2020). https://renproject.io/renvm. Accessed 19 Sep 2020

  22. Abraham, I., Gueta, G., Malkhi, D.: Hot-stuff the linear, optimal-resilience, one-message bft devil (2018). arXiv:1803.05069

  23. Adler, J., Berryhill, R., Veneris, A., Poulos, Z., Veira, N., Kastania, A.: Astraea: a decentralized blockchain oracle. In: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet Of Things (IThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData), pp. 1145–1152. IEEE (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Al-Bassam, M.: Lazyledger: A distributed data availability ledger with client-side smart contracts. arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.09274 (2019)

  25. Al-Bassam, M., Sonnino, A., Bano, S., Hrycyszyn, D., Danezis, G.: Chainspace: A sharded smart contracts platform. In: 2018 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Al-Bassam, M., Sonnino, A., Buterin, V.: Fraud proofs: Maximising light client security and scaling blockchains with dishonest majorities. arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.09044, vol. 160, (2018)

  27. Androulaki, E., Cachin, C., De Caro, A., Kokoris-Kogias, E.: Channels: horizontal scaling and confidentiality on permissioned blockchains. In: Lopez, J., Zhou, J., Soriano, M. (eds.) ESORICS 2018. LNCS, vol. 11098, pp. 111–131. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99073-6_6

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  28. Andrychowicz, M.: Multiparty computation protocols based on cryptocurrencies (2015). https://depotuw.ceon.pl/bitstream/handle/item/1327/dis.pdf. Accessed 02 Apr 2021

  29. Asokan, N.: Fairness in electronic commerce (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Asokan, N., Shoup, V., Waidner, M.: Asynchronous protocols for optimistic fair exchange. In: Proceedings 1998 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Cat. No. 98CB36186), pp. 86–99. IEEE (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Asokan, N., Shoup, V., Waidner, M.: Optimistic fair exchange of digital signatures. In: Nyberg, K. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 1998. LNCS, vol. 1403, pp. 591–606. Springer, Heidelberg (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0054156

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  32. Aumayr, L., et al.: Generalized bitcoin-compatible channels. IACR Cryptolology ePrint Arch. 2020, vol. 476 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  33. Avarikioti, G., Käppeli, L., Wang, Y., Wattenhofer, R.: Bitcoin security under temporary dishonest majority. In: 23rd Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC) (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  34. Avarikioti, G., Kogias, E.K., Wattenhofer, R.: Brick: Asynchronous state channels. arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.11360 (2019)

  35. Avarikioti, G., Kokoris-Kogias, E., Wattenhofer, R.: Divide and scale: formalization of distributed ledger sharding protocols. arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.10434 (2019)

  36. Avarikioti, G., Laufenberg, F., Sliwinski, J., Wang, Y., Wattenhofer, R.: Towards secure and efficient payment channels. arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.12740 (2018)

  37. Babaoglu, O., Toueg, S.: Understanding non-blocking atomic commitment. Distributed Systems, pp. 147–168 (1993)

    Google Scholar 

  38. Back, A., et al.: Enabling blockchain innovations with pegged sidechains (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  39. Belchior, R., Vasconcelos, A., Guerreiro, S., Correia, M.: A survey on blockchain interoperability: past, present, and future trends. arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.14282 (2020)

  40. Ben-Sasson, E., Bentov, I., Horesh, Y., Riabzev, M.: Scalable, transparent, and post-quantum secure computational integrity. IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive 2018, vol. 46 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  41. Ben-Sasson, E., Chiesa, A., Spooner, N.: Interactive oracle proofs. In: Hirt, M., Smith, A. (eds.) TCC 2016. LNCS, vol. 9986, pp. 31–60. Springer, Heidelberg (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53644-5_2

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  42. Bennink, P., Gijtenbeek, L.V., Deventer, O.V., Everts, M.: An analysis of atomic swaps on and between ethereum blockchains using smart contracts. Technical report (2018). https://work.delaat.net/rp/2017-2018/p42/report.pdf

  43. Bentov, I., et al.: Tesseract: Real-time cryptocurrency exchange using trusted hardware. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2017/1153 (2017). Accessed 04 Dec 2017

    Google Scholar 

  44. Bentov, I., Kumaresan, R.: How to use bitcoin to design fair protocols. In: Garay, J.A., Gennaro, R. (eds.) CRYPTO 2014. LNCS, vol. 8617, pp. 421–439. Springer, Heidelberg (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44381-1_24

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  45. Bentov, I., Pass, R., Shi, E.: Snow white: Provably secure proofs of stake (2016). Accessed 08 Nov 2016

    Google Scholar 

  46. Bernstein, P.A., Hadzilacos, V., Goodman, N.: Concurrency control and recovery in database systems, vol. 370. Addison-wesley, New York (1987)

    Google Scholar 

  47. Bitansky, N., Canetti, R., Chiesa, A., Tromer, E.: From extractable collision resistance to succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge, and back again. In: Proceedings of the 3rd Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference, pp. 326–349. ACM (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  48. Boneh, D., Bonneau, J., Bünz, B., Fisch, B.: Verifiable delay functions. In: CRYPTO (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  49. Boneh, D., Bünz, B., Fisch, B.: Batching techniques for accumulators with applications to iops and stateless blockchains. In: Boldyreva, A., Micciancio, D. (eds.) CRYPTO 2019. LNCS, vol. 11692, pp. 561–586. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26948-7_20

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  50. Boneh, D., Naor, M.: Timed commitments. In: Bellare, M. (ed.) CRYPTO 2000. LNCS, vol. 1880, pp. 236–254. Springer, Heidelberg (2000). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44598-6_15

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  51. Bonneau, J.: Why buy when you can rent? bribery attacks on bitcoin consensus. In: BITCOIN ’16: Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Bitcoin and Blockchain Research, February 2016

    Google Scholar 

  52. Bonneau, J., Clark, J., Goldfeder, S.: On bitcoin as a public randomness source (2015). Accessed 25 Act 2015

    Google Scholar 

  53. Bünz, B., Bootle, J., Boneh, D., Poelstra, A., Wuille, P., Maxwell, G.: Bulletproofs: Efficient range proofs for confidential transactions (2017). Accessed 10 Nov 2017

    Google Scholar 

  54. Bünz, B., Goldfeder, S., Bonneau, J.: Proofs-of-delay and randomness beacons in ethereum (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  55. Burdges, J., et al.: Overview of polkadot and its design considerations. arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.13456 (2020)

  56. Buterin, V.: Ethereum: A next-generation smart contract and decentralized application platform (2014). Accessed 22 Aug 2016

    Google Scholar 

  57. Buterin, V.: Chain interoperability. Technical report (2016). Accessed 25 Mar 2017

    Google Scholar 

  58. Buterin, V.: Cross-shard contract yanking. https://ethresear.ch/t/cross-shard-contract-yanking/1450 (2018)

  59. Cachin, C.: Architecture of the hyperledger blockchain fabric (2016). Accessed 10 Aug 2016

    Google Scholar 

  60. Cachin, C., Camenisch, J.: Optimistic fair secure computation. In: Bellare, M. (ed.) CRYPTO 2000. LNCS, vol. 1880, pp. 93–111. Springer, Heidelberg (2000). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44598-6_6

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  61. Castro, M., Liskov, B., et al.: Practical byzantine fault tolerance. OSDI 99, 173–186 (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  62. Chesney, T., Coyne, I., Logan, B., Madden, N.: Griefing in virtual worlds: causes, casualties and coping strategies. Inform. Syst. J. 19(6), 525–548 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  63. Daveas, S., Karantias, K., Kiayias, A., Zindros, D.: A gas-efficient superlight bitcoin client in solidity. In: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies, pp. 132–144 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  64. David, B., Gaži, P., Kiayias, A., Russell, A.: Ouroboros praos: an adaptively-secure, semi-synchronous proof-of-stake blockchain. In: Nielsen, J.B., Rijmen, V. (eds.) EUROCRYPT 2018. LNCS, vol. 10821, pp. 66–98. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78375-8_3

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  65. Decker, C., Wattenhofer, R.: Bitcoin transaction malleability and MtGox. In: Kutyłowski, M., Vaidya, J. (eds.) ESORICS 2014. LNCS, vol. 8713, pp. 313–326. Springer, Cham (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11212-1_18

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  66. Deshpande, A., Herlihy, M.: Privacy-preserving cross-chain atomic swaps. In: Bernhard, M., Bracciali, A., Camp, L.J., Matsuo, S., Maurushat, A., Rønne, P.B., Sala, M. (eds.) FC 2020. LNCS, vol. 12063, pp. 540–549. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54455-3_38

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  67. Dijkstra, E.W.: Solution of a problem in concurrent programming control. In: Pioneers and Their Contributions to Software Engineering, pp. 289–294. Springer (2001). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-48354-7_10

  68. Dilley, J., Poelstra, A., Wilkins, J., Piekarska, M., Gorlick, B., Friedenbach, M.: Strong federations: An interoperable blockchain solution to centralized third party risks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.05491 (2016)

  69. Douceur, J.R.: The sybil attack. In: Druschel, P., Kaashoek, F., Rowstron, A. (eds.) IPTPS 2002. LNCS, vol. 2429, pp. 251–260. Springer, Heidelberg (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45748-8_24

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  70. Dziembowski, S., Eckey, L., Faust, S.: Fairswap: how to fairly exchange digital goods. In: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 967–984. ACM (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  71. Egger, C., Moreno-Sanchez, P., Maffei, M.: Atomic multi-channel updates with constant collateral in bitcoin-compatible payment-channel networks. In: CCS (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  72. Even, S.: A protocol for signing contracts. Technical report, Computer Science Department, Technion. Presented at CRYPTO’81 (1982)

    Google Scholar 

  73. Even, S., Yacobi, Y.: Relations among public key signature systems. Technical report, Computer Science Department, Technion (1980)

    Google Scholar 

  74. Eyal, I., Sirer, E.G.: Majority is not enough: Bitcoin mining is vulnerable. In: Financial Cryptography and Data Security, pp. 436–454. Springer (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  75. Fanti, G., Kogan, L., Oh, S., Ruan, K., Viswanath, P., Wang, G.: Compounding of wealth in proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies. arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.07468 (2018)

  76. Fischer, M.J., Lynch, N.A., Paterson, M.S.: Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process, vol. 32, pp. 374–382. ACM (1985)

    Google Scholar 

  77. Garay, J.A., Kiayias, A., Leonardos, N.: The bitcoin backbone protocol with chains of variable difficulty (2016). Accessed 06 Feb 2017

    Google Scholar 

  78. Gärtner, F.C.: Specifications for fault tolerance: A comedy of failures (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  79. Gaži, P., Kiayias, A., Russell, A.: Stake-bleeding attacks on proof-of-stake blockchains. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2018/248 (2018). Accessed 12 Mar 2018

    Google Scholar 

  80. Gazi, P., Kiayias, A., Zindros, D.: Proof-of-stake sidechains. IEEE Security and Privacy, IEEE (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  81. Gennaro, R., Goldfeder, S., Narayanan, A.: Threshold-optimal DSA/ECDSA signatures and an application to bitcoin wallet security. In: Manulis, M., Sadeghi, A.-R., Schneider, S. (eds.) ACNS 2016. LNCS, vol. 9696, pp. 156–174. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39555-5_9

    Chapter  MATH  Google Scholar 

  82. Gervais, A., Karame, G.O., Wüst, K., Glykantzis, V., Ritzdorf, H., Capkun, S.: On the security and performance of proof of work blockchains. In: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC, pp. 3–16. ACM (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  83. Goldreich, O.: Secure multi-party computation. Manuscript. Preliminary version, vol. 78 (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  84. Green, M., Miers, I.: Bolt: Anonymous payment channels for decentralized currencies. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2016/701 (2016). Accessed 07 Aug 2017

    Google Scholar 

  85. Gudgeon, L., Moreno-Sanchez, P., Roos, S., McCorry, P., Gervais, A.: Sok: Off the chain transactions. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2019/360 (2019). https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/360

  86. Han, R., Lin, H., Yu, J.: On the optionality and fairness of atomic swaps. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2019/896 (2019). https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/896

  87. Harz, D., Boman, M.: The scalability of trustless trust. arXiv:1801.09535 (2018). Accessed 31 Jan 2018

  88. Heilman, E., Alshenibr, L., Baldimtsi, F., Scafuro, A., Goldberg, S.: Tumblebit: An untrusted bitcoin-compatible anonymous payment hub (2016). Accessed 29 Sep 2017

    Google Scholar 

  89. Heilman, E., Lipmann, S., Goldberg, S.: The arwen trading protocols. Whitepaper. https://www.arwen.io/whitepaper.pdf

  90. Herlihy, M.: Atomic cross-chain swaps. arXiv:1801.09515 (2018). Accessed 31 Jan 2018

  91. Herlihy, M., Liskov, B., Shrira, L.: Cross-chain deals and adversarial commerce. arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.09743 (2019)

  92. Hinteregger, A., Haslhofer, B.: An empirical analysis of monero cross-chain traceability. arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.02808 (2018)

  93. Hosp, D., Hoenisch, T., Kittiwongsunthorn, P., et al.: Comit-cryptographically-secure off-chain multi-asset instant transaction network. arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.02174 (2018)

  94. Itakura, K., Nakamura, K.: A public-key cryptosystem suitable for digital multisignatures. NEC Res. Dev. 71, 1–8 (1983)

    Google Scholar 

  95. Johnson, D., Menezes, A., Vanstone, S.: The elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ecdsa). Int. J. Inform. Secur. 1(1), 36–63 (2001)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  96. Johnson, S., Robinson, P., Brainard, J.: Sidechains and interoperability. arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.04077 (2019)

  97. Jones, J.: abitmore. Optional htlc preimage length and hash160 addition. BSIP 64, blog post. https://github.com/bitshares/bsips/issues/163

  98. Judmayer, A., et al.: Pay-to-win: Incentive attacks on proof-of-work cryptocurrencies. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2019/775 (2019). https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/775

  99. Judmayer, A., Zamyatin, A., Stifter, N., Voyiatzis, A.G., Weippl, E.: Merged mining: Curse or cure? In: CBT’17: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology, September 2017

    Google Scholar 

  100. Kalodner, H., Goldfeder, S., Chen, X., Weinberg, S.M., Felten, E.W.: Arbitrum: Scalable, private smart contracts. In: Proceedings of the 27th USENIX Conference on Security Symposium, pp. 1353–1370. USENIX Association (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  101. Karantias, K., Kiayias, A., Zindros, D.: Proof-of-burn. In: Bonneau, J., Heninger, N. (eds.) FC 2020. LNCS, vol. 12059, pp. 523–540. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51280-4_28

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  102. Khabbazian, M., Nadahalli, T., Wattenhofer, R.: Outpost: A responsive lightweight watchtower (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  103. Kiayias, A., Miller, A., Zindros, D.: Non-interactive proofs of proof-of-work. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2017/963 (2017). Accessed 03 Act 2017

    Google Scholar 

  104. Kiayias, A., Polydouri, A., Zindros, D.: The Velvet Path to Superlight Blockchain Clients (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  105. Kiayias, A., Russell, A., David, B., Oliynykov, R.: Ouroboros: a provably secure proof-of-stake blockchain protocol. In: Katz, J., Shacham, H. (eds.) CRYPTO 2017. LNCS, vol. 10401, pp. 357–388. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63688-7_12

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  106. Kiayias, A., Zhou, H.-S., Zikas, V.: Fair and robust multi-party computation using a global transaction ledger. In: Fischlin, M., Coron, J.-S. (eds.) EUROCRYPT 2016. LNCS, vol. 9666, pp. 705–734. Springer, Heidelberg (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-49896-5_25

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  107. Kiayias, A., Zindros, D.: Proof-of-work sidechains. In: International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Springer (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  108. Kogias, E.K., Jovanovic, P., Gailly, N., Khoffi, I., Gasser, L., Ford, B.: Enhancing bitcoin security and performance with strong consistency via collective signing. In: 25th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 16), Austin, TX, Auguest 2016. USENIX Association

    Google Scholar 

  109. Kokoris-Kogias, E.: Robust and scalable consensus for sharded distributed ledgers. Technical report, Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2019/676 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  110. Kokoris-Kogias, E., et al.: Calypso: Auditable sharing of private data over blockchains. Technical report, Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2018/209 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  111. Kokoris-Kogias, E., Jovanovic, P., Gasser, L., Gailly, N., Syta, E., Ford, B.: Omniledger: A secure, scale-out, decentralized ledger via sharding. In: 2018 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), pp. 583–598. IEEE (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  112. Kumaresan, R., Bentov, I.: Amortizing secure computation with penalties. In: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 418–429. ACM (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  113. Küpçü, A., Lysyanskaya, A.: Usable optimistic fair exchange. Comput. Netw. 56(1), 50–63 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  114. Kwon, J., Buchman, E.: Cosmos: A network of distributed ledgers. https://github.com/cosmos/cosmos/blob/master/WHITEPAPER.md (2015)

  115. Kwon, Y., Kim, H., Shin, J., Kim, Y.: Bitcoin vs. bitcoin cash: Coexistence or downfall of bitcoin cash? arXiv:1902.11064 (2019)

  116. Lamport, L.: A simple approach to specifying concurrent systems. Commun. ACM 32(1), 32–45 (1989)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  117. Lerner, S.: Drivechains, sidechains and hybrid 2-way peg designs. Technical report, Tech. Rep. [Online] (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  118. Lerner, S.D.: Rootstock: Bitcoin powered smart contracts. https://docs.rsk.co/RSK_White_Paper-Overview.pdf (2015)

  119. Liu, Z., et al.: Hyperservice: Interoperability and programmability across heterogeneous blockchains. arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.09343 (2019)

  120. Luu, L., Buenz, B., Zamani, M.: Flyclient super light client for cryptocurrencies. Accessed 17 Apr 2018

    Google Scholar 

  121. Malavolta, G., Moreno-Sanchez, P., Kate, A., Maffei, M., Ravi, S.: Concurrency and privacy with payment-channel networks. In: CCS, pp. 455–471 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  122. Malavolta, G., Moreno-Sanchez, P., Schneidewind, C., Kate, A., Maffei, M.: Anonymous multi-hop locks for blockchain scalability and interoperability. In: NDSS (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  123. McCorry, P., Bakshi, S., Bentov, I., Miller, A., Meiklejohn, S.: Pisa: Arbitration outsourcing for state channels. IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive 2018, vol. 582 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  124. McCorry, P., Heilman, E., Miller, A.: Atomically trading with roger: Gambling on the success of a hardfork. In: CBT’17: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology, September 2017

    Google Scholar 

  125. McCorry, P., Hicks, A., Meiklejohn, S.: Smart contracts for bribing miners. In: 5th Workshop on Bitcoin and Blockchain Research, Financial Cryptography and Data Security 18 (FC). Springer (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  126. Meckler, I., Shapiro, E.: Coda: Decentralized cryptocurrency at scale. https://cdn.codaprotocol.com/v2/static/coda-whitepaper-05-10-2018-0.pdf (2018)

  127. Meshkov, D., Chepurnoy, A., Jansen, M.: Revisiting difficulty control for blockchain systems. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2017/731 (2017). Accessed 03 Aug 2017

    Google Scholar 

  128. Micali, S.: Algorand: The efficient and democratic ledger (2016). Accessed 09 Feb 2017

    Google Scholar 

  129. Miraz, M., Donald, D.C.: Atomic cross-chain swaps: Development, trajectory and potential of non-monetary digital token swap facilities. Annals of Emerging Technologies in Computing (AETiC), vol. 3 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  130. Moreno-Sanchez, P., Randomrun, D.V.L., Noether, S., Goodell, B., Kate, A.: Dlsag: Non-interactive refund transactions for interoperable payment channels in monero. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2019/595 (2019). https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/595

  131. Nakamoto, S.: Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system, December 2008. Accessed 01 Jul 2015

    Google Scholar 

  132. Noether, S.: Discrete logarithm equality across groups. Online (2020). https://www.getmonero.org/resources/research-lab/pubs/MRL-0010.pdf

  133. Pagnia, H., Gärtner, F.C.: On the impossibility of fair exchange without a trusted third party. Technical report, Technical Report TUD-BS-1999-02, Darmstadt University of Technology (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  134. Pass, R., Shi, E.: Hybrid consensus: Scalable permissionless consensus, September 2016. Accessed 17 Act 2016

    Google Scholar 

  135. Poelstra, A.: Scriptless scripts. Presentation slides. https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/wizardry/mw-slides/2017-03-mit-bitcoin-expo/slides.pdf

  136. Poon, J., Dryja, T.: The bitcoin lightning network (2016). Accessed 07 Jul 2016

    Google Scholar 

  137. Ritzdorf, H., Wüst, K., Gervais, A., Felley, G., et al.: Tls-n: Non-repudiation over tls enabling ubiquitous content signing. In: Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  138. Rivest, R.L., Shamir, A., Wagner, D.A.: Time-lock puzzles and timed-release crypto (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  139. Rocket, T.: Snowflake to avalanche: A novel metastable consensus protocol family for cryptocurrencies (2018). Accessed 4 Dec 2018

    Google Scholar 

  140. Rubin, J., Naik, M., Subramanian, N.: Merkelized abstract syntax trees. http://www.mit.edu/jlrubin/public/pdfs/858report.pdf (2014)

  141. Sapirshtein, A., Sompolinsky, Y., Zohar, A.: Optimal selfish mining strategies in bitcoin (2015). Accessed 22 Aug 2016

    Google Scholar 

  142. Schnorr, C.P.: Efficient signature generation by smart cards. J. Cryptol. 4(3), 161–174 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00196725

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  143. Siris, V.A., Dimopoulos, D., Fotiou, N., Voulgaris, S., Polyzos, G.C.: Interledger smart contracts for decentralized authorization to constrained things (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  144. Sonnino, A., Bano, S., Al-Bassam, M., Danezis, G.: Replay attacks and defenses against cross-shard consensus in sharded distributed ledgers. arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.11218 (2019)

  145. Spoke, M., Nuco Engineering Team. Aion: The third-generation blockchain network. https://aion.network/media/2018/03/aion.network_technical-introduction_en.pdf. Accessed 17 Apr 2018

  146. Stewart, A., Kokoris-Kogia, E.: Grandpa: a byzantine finality gadget. arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.01560 (2020)

  147. Stewart, I.: Proof of burn (2012). Accessed 10 May 2017

    Google Scholar 

  148. Stifter, N., Schindler, P., Judmayer, A., Zamyatin, A., Kern, A., Weippl, E.: Echoes of the past: Recovering blockchain metrics from merged mining. In: Proceedings of the 23nd International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC). Springer (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  149. Syverson, P.: Weakly secret bit commitment: applications to lotteries and fair exchange. In: Proceedings 11th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop (Cat. No. 98TB100238), pp. 2–13. IEEE (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  150. Tairi, E., Moreno-Sanchez, P., Maffei, M.: A\({^2}\)l: anonymous atomic locks for scalability and interoperability in payment channel hubs. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2019/589 (2019). https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/589

  151. Teutsch, J., Reitwießner, C.: A scalable verification solution for blockchains, March 2017. Accessed 06 Act 2017

    Google Scholar 

  152. Teutsch, J., Straka, M., Boneh, D.: Retrofitting a two-way peg between blockchains. Technical report (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  153. Teutsch, J.: TrueBit Establishment. On decentralized oracles for data availability (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  154. Thomas, S., Schwartz, E.: A protocol for interledger payments. https://interledger.org/interledger.pdf (2015)

  155. Thyagarajan, S.A.K., Malavolta, G.: Lockable signatures for blockchains: Scriptless scripts for all signatures. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2020/1613 (2020). https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1613

  156. Verdian, G., Tasca, P., Paterson, C., Mondelli, G.: Quant overledger whitepaper. https://www.quant.network/ (2018)

  157. Westerkamp, M., Eberhardt, J.: zkrelay: facilitating sidechains using zksnark-based chain-relays. Contract 1(2), 3 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  158. Wood, G.: Polkadot: Vision for a heterogeneous multi-chain framework. White Paper (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  159. Wood, G.: Ethereum: A secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger eip-150 revision (759dccd - 2017–08-07) (2017). Accessed 03 Jan 2018

    Google Scholar 

  160. Yao, A.C.-C.: How to generate and exchange secrets. In: 27th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (sfcs 1986), pp. 162–167. IEEE (1986)

    Google Scholar 

  161. Yousaf, H., Kappos, G., Meiklejohn, S.: Tracing transactions across cryptocurrency ledgers. In: 28th \(\{\)USENIX\(\}\) Security Symposium (\(\{\)USENIX\(\}\) Security 19), pp. 837–850 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  162. Yu, M., Sahraei, S., Li, S., Avestimehr, S., Kannan, S., Viswanath, P.: Coded merkle tree: Solving data availability attacks in blockchains. arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.01247 (2019)

  163. Zamani, M., Movahedi, M., Raykova, M.: Rapidchain: A fast blockchain protocol via full sharding. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2018/460 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  164. Zamyatin, A., Avarikioti, Z., Perez, D., Knottenbelt, W.J.: Txchain: Efficient cryptocurrency light clients via contingent transaction aggregation, September 2020

    Google Scholar 

  165. Zamyatin, A., Harz, D., Lind, J., Panayiotou, P., Gervais, A., Knottenbelt, W.: Xclaim: Trustless, interoperable, cryptocurrency-backed assets. IEEE Security and Privacy, IEEE (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  166. Zhang, F., Maram, S.K.D., Malvai, S., Goldfeder, H., Juels, A.: Deco: Liberating web data using decentralized oracles for tls. arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.00938 (2019)

Download references

Acknowledgements

We would like express our gratitude to Georgia Avarikioti, Daniel Perez and Dominik Harz for helpful comments and feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript. We also thank Nicholas Stifter, Aljosha Judmayer, Philipp Schindler, Edgar Weippl, and Alistair Stewart for insightful discussions during the early stages of this research. We also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments that helped improve the presentation of our results.

This research was funded by Bridge 1 858561 SESC; Bridge 1 864738 PR4DLT (all FFG); the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Security and Quality Improvement in the Production System Lifecycle (CDL-SQI); the competence center SBA-K1 funded by COMET; Chaincode Labs through the project SLN: Scalability for the Lightning Network; and by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) through the Meitner program (project M-2608).

Mustafa Al-Bassam is funded by a scholarship from the Alan Turing Institute. Alexei Zamyatin conducted the early stages of this work during his time at SBA Research, and was supported by a Binance Research Fellowship.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Imperial College London, London, UK

    Alexei Zamyatin & William J. Knottenbelt

  2. Interlay, Hartlebury, UK

    Alexei Zamyatin

  3. University College London, London, UK

    Mustafa Al-Bassam

  4. University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Dionysis Zindros

  5. IST Austria, Klosterneuburg, Austria

    Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias

  6. Novi Research, Tampere, Finland

    Pedro Moreno-Sanchez

  7. IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid, Spain

    Aggelos Kiayias

  8. IOHK, Hong kong, China

    Aggelos Kiayias

  9. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias

Authors
  1. Alexei Zamyatin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Mustafa Al-Bassam
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Dionysis Zindros
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Pedro Moreno-Sanchez
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Aggelos Kiayias
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  7. William J. Knottenbelt
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexei Zamyatin .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Nikita Borisov

  2. KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Claudia Diaz

A Fair Exchange Using \(\mathsf {CCC}\)

A Fair Exchange Using \(\mathsf {CCC}\)

We provide the intuition of how to construct a Fair Exchange protocol using a generic \(\mathsf {CCC}\) protocol in Algorithm 1. Specifically, P and Q exchange assets \(a_P\) and \(a_Q\), if transaction \(\textsc {tx}^{}_{P}\) is written to \(\mathsf {L}_x\) and transaction \(\textsc {tx}^{}_{Q}\) is written to \(\mathsf {L}_y\) (cf. Sect. 3.2).

figure d
figure e
figure f
figure g

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 International Financial Cryptography Association

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Zamyatin, A. et al. (2021). SoK: Communication Across Distributed Ledgers. In: Borisov, N., Diaz, C. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12675. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64331-0_1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64331-0_1

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-64330-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-64331-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation