Watch / Fraud Proofs: Maximising Light Client Security and Scaling Blockchains with Dishonest Majorities

Fraud Proofs: Maximising Light Client Security and Scaling Blockchains with Dishonest Majorities

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Fraud Proofs: Maximising Light Client Security and Scaling Blockchains with Dishonest Majorities

Duration: 00:26:05

Speaker: Mustafa Al-Bassam

Type: Talk

Expertise: Intermediate

Event: Devcon 4

Date: Oct 2018

Light clients are nodes which only download a small portion of all of the data in a blockchain, and try to use indirect means to verify that a given chain is valid. Typically, instead of validating block data, they assume that the chain favoured by the blockchain's consensus algorithm only contains valid blocks, and that the majority of block producers are honest. By allowing such clients to receive fraud proofs generated by fully validating nodes that a block violates the protocol rules, we can eliminate the assumption that the majority of consensus-participating nodes are honest, and instead assume that there is at least one honest fully validating node that can distribute fraud proofs within a maximum network delay, and a minimum number of honest light clients to reconstruct missing data from blocks. Fraud proofs and data availability proofs are key to enabling on-chain scaling of blockchains (e.g. via sharding or bigger blocks) without significantly reducing the ability of end-user wallets to have assurance that all on-chain data is available and valid. We present, implement, and evaluate a novel complete fraud proof and data availability proof system. Research paper draft (work-in-progress): https://www.dropbox.com/s/3zj3burdfrw5v69/fraudproofs-paper.pdf Data availability code: https://github.com/musalbas/rsmt2d Fraud proofs prototype (work-in-progress): https://github.com/asonnino/fraudproofs-prototype

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About the speakers

MA

Mustafa Al-Bassam

Researcher

I am a PhD student at the Information Security Research Group of the Department of Computer Science at University College London. My research interests include on-chain scaling, sharding and blockchain security.

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