A full-stack study of blockchains on security, performance, and incentive

Wang, Gerui

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115493 Copy

Description

Title

A full-stack study of blockchains on security, performance, and incentive

Author(s)

Wang, Gerui

Issue Date

2022-04-19

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Viswanath, Pramod

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Viswanath, Pramod

Committee Member(s)

• Rosu, Grigore
• Miller, Andrew
• Ren, Ling
• Nayak, Kartik

Department of Study

Computer Science

Discipline

Computer Science

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• blockchain
• consensus
• incentive
• blockchain performance
• smart contract
• blockchain forensics

Abstract

Blockchains have attracted colossal attention recently and are impacting various research areas while encountering several stiff challenges. This thesis makes contributions to blockchains by addressing three vital challenges in security, performance, and incentive. First, the security challenge arises when malicious parties are beyond the threshold and launch a successful safety attack. A novel action called forensics is designed to detect the attackers with irrefutable proof. Moreover, the forensic support metric is mathematically formalized and systematically characterized for Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols such as PBFT, HotStuff, and VABA, all of which possess strong forensic support. On the contrary, Algorand, a player replaceable protocol, is shown to have no forensic support. A novel protocol with both player replaceability and strong forensic support is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of having both properties in one BFT protocol. Next, the performance challenge refers to the consensus layer bottleneck of permissionless blockchains. This bottleneck is removed by a novel consensus protocol called Prism, implemented in clients with a flexible interface to support smart contracts. Experiments show empirical evidence that Prism has removed the consensus layer performance bottleneck. Finally, the incentive challenge is the phenomenon of token compounding in proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains which leads to unfair reward distribution and discourages parties with a small number of tokens from joining PoS blockchains. A metric of fair reward distribution called equitability is mathematically formalized and analyzed for extant reward distribution mechanisms. Furthermore, a novel mechanism called the geometric reward is introduced and proved to be the most equitable.

Graduation Semester

2022-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2022 Gerui Wang

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