Name
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. |
Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2021 | 10.1007/978-3-662-64331-0_1 | FINANCIAL CRYPTOGRAPHY AND DATA SECURITY, FC 2021, PT II |
DocType | Volume | ISSN |
Conference | 12675 | 0302-9743 |
Citations | PageRank | References |
0 | 0.34 | 0 |
Authors | ||
7 | ||
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alexei Zamyatin | 1 | 17 | 6.86 |
| Mustafa Al-Bassam | 2 | 1 | 1.37 |
| Dionysis Zindros | 3 | 0 | 1.01 |
| Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias | 4 | 149 | 14.56 |
| Pedro Moreno-Sanchez | 5 | 0 | 0.34 |
| Aggelos Kiayias | 6 | 4266 | 238.75 |
| W. J. Knottenbelt | 7 | 31 | 4.19 |