Title
Ostraka: Secure Blockchain Scaling by Node Sharding
Abstract
Cryptocurrencies, implemented with blockchain protocols, promise to become a global payment system if they can overcome performance limitations. Rapidly advancing architectures improve on latency and throughput, but most require all participating servers to process all transactions. Several recent works propose to shard the system, such that each machine would only process a subset of the transactions. However, we identify a denial-of-service attack that is exposed by these solutions - an attacker can generate transactions that would overload a single shard, thus delaying processing in the entire system. Moreover, we show that in common scenarios, these protocols require most node operators to process almost all blockchain transactions. We present Ostraka, a blockchain node architecture that shards (parallelizes) the nodes themselves. We prove that replacing a unified node with an Ostraka node does not affect the security of the underlying consensus mechanism. We evaluate analytically and experimentally block propagation and processing in various settings. Ostraka allows nodes in the network to scale, without costly coordination. In our experiments, Ostraka nodes transaction processing rate grows linearly with the addition of resources.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/EuroSPW51379.2020.00060
2020 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW)
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
Distributed systems,Blockchain,Network security
Conference
978-1-7281-8598-9
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Manuskin Alex100.34
Mirkin Michael200.34
Ittay Eyal330426.11