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Security Analysis of Blockchain Layer-One Sharding Based Extended-UTxO Model

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Communications, Networking, and Information Systems (CNIS 2023)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1839))

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Abstract

Blockchain technology facilitates the transfer of digital assets, accomplished through the distributed storage of a transaction ledger, allowing peer-to-peer participant nodes to agree on valid transactions based on their local records without the reliance on centralised infrastructure or trusted participants. Distributed ledgers are increasing in public adoption, which can be attributed to the permissionless infrastructure and a rise in decentralised finance (DeFi) protocols. In this growth, shortcomings in throughput and latency have been highlighted, especially when compared to traditional payment channels. The extended-UTXO (eUTXO) model offers the untapped potential to support a functionally scalable infrastructure by adopting qualities of both the account model, and directed acyclic graph-structured UTXO model. We identified the unique benefits of eUTXO as: the ability to bundle the transaction processing of non-conflicting input states, achieving parallelism at the validator nodes; and the ability to implement complex off-chain scaling solutions through smart contracts. This research examines the security impact of sharding when applied alongside an eUTXO ledger. To illustrate this we introduce S-EUTO, a novel proof-of-concept state-sharding protocol. It leverages distributed randomness to ensure unbiased node-to-shard distribution and introduces an input/output cross-shard transaction architecture to maintain global state synchronisation. Our model demonstrated the potential of sharding alongside eUTXO without compromising security.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing and Informatics, Bournemouth University, Dorset, BH12 5BB, UK

    Cayo Fletcher-Smith & Muntadher Sallal

Authors
  1. Cayo Fletcher-Smith
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  2. Muntadher Sallal
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Correspondence to Muntadher Sallal .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Haonan Chen

  2. Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Pingyi Fan

  3. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Lipo Wang

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© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

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Fletcher-Smith, C., Sallal, M. (2023). Security Analysis of Blockchain Layer-One Sharding Based Extended-UTxO Model. In: Chen, H., Fan, P., Wang, L. (eds) Communications, Networking, and Information Systems. CNIS 2023. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1839. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3581-9_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3581-9_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-99-3580-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-99-3581-9

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