Improved authenticated data structures for blockchain synchronization

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2018

Author dc:creator

• Qian, Xiaoyao

Contributors dc:contributor

• Miller, Andrew

• blockchain
• Ethereum
• authenticated data structure

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2018 Xiaoyao Qian

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

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

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F101567