University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Improved authenticated data structures for blockchain synchronization

Qian, Xiaoyao

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/101567

Description

Title
Improved authenticated data structures for blockchain synchronization
Author(s)
Qian, Xiaoyao
Issue Date
2018-07-16
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Miller, Andrew
Department of Study
Computer Science
Discipline
Computer Science
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
M.S.
Degree Level
Thesis
Keyword(s)
  • blockchain
  • Ethereum
  • authenticated data structure
Abstract
One of the most important components in a public blockchain like Bitcoin and Ethereum is the authenticated data structure that keeps track of all block data, transactions, and the world state (account balance, smart contract states, etc.) Thanks to authenticated data structures, lightweight nodes only need to store authentication information and can delegate queries to those nodes with a full replica of data and the authenticated data structure. The lightweight nodes can trust the query results after verifying against the authentication information. It is also critical to have enough nodes in the network that are equipped with the authenticated data structure to ensure scalability and availability, which is especially important for public blockchains. Therefore, every public blockchain highly encourages users to download the authenticated data structure as the first step. Fetching all elements from the entire authenticated data structure is a novel query type that has not gathered attention in the past. We describe this new emerging query type in the three-party authenticated data structure (ADS). We improve the design and implementation of the authenticated data structure so that the new query type is well-supported. We specifically apply the improvements to the Ethereum blockchain network. With our proposed ADS system in Ethereum, we improve Ethereum state synchronization performance by 216 times.
Graduation Semester
2018-08
Type of Resource
text
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/101567
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2018 Xiaoyao Qian

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