CoChain: High Concurrency Blockchain Sharding via Consensus on Consensus

Mingzhe Li1; You Lin1; Jin Zhang1; Wei Wang2

10.1109/INFOCOM53939.2023.10228892

2023

0743-166X

979-8-3503-3415-9

IEEE INFOCOM 2023 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications

2023-May

1-10

17-20 May 2023

New York City, NY, USA

Sharding is an effective technique to improve the scalability of blockchain. It splits nodes into multiple groups so that they can process transactions in parallel. To achieve higher parallelism and concurrency at large scales, it is desirable to maintain a large number of small shards. However, simply configuring small shards easily results in a higher fraction of malicious nodes inside shards, causing shard corruption and compromising system security. Existing sharding techniques hence demand large shards, at the expense of limited concurrency. To address this limitation, we propose CoChain: a blockchain sharding system that can securely configure small shards for enhanced concurrency. CoChain allows some shards to be corrupted. For security, each shard is monitored by multiple other shards. The latter reach a cross-shard Consensus on the Consensus results of their monitored shard. Once a corrupted shard is found, its subsequent consensus will be taken over by another shard, hence recovering the system. Via Consensus on Consensus, CoChain allows the existence of shards with more fraction of malicious nodes (<2/3) while securing the system, thus reducing the shard size safely. We implement CoChain based on Harmony and conduct extensive experiments. Compared with Harmony, CoChain achieves 35x throughput gain with 6,000+ nodes.

Concurrent computing Sharding Protocols Scalability Parallel processing Throughput Blockchains

第一

EI

20233814771412

Database Systems:723.3

IEEE

1.Computer Science and Engineering Department, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Brain-Inspired Intelligent Computation, Research Institute of Trustworthy Autonomous Systems, Southern University of Science and Technology
2.Computer Science and Engineering Department, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Mingzhe Li,You Lin,Jin Zhang,et al. CoChain: High Concurrency Blockchain Sharding via Consensus on Consensus[C],2023:1-10.