EAGER: SaTC: CORE: Small: Blockchain Architectures for Resource-Constrained Devices

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

A blockchain is a massively distributed, immutable database containing verifiable records of transactions. While the blockchain technology has emerged as the foundational technology for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, it has far-reaching implications in numerous societal settings (such as in healthcare, supply-chains, and the Internet-of-Things) due to its ability to maintain authoritative records in a fully decentralized, secure, and trustless manner. However, despite being such a promising technology, one of the main roadblocks in the proliferation of blockchain applications is that current blockchain designs are resource-intensive, in terms of storage, computation, and communication. The goal of this project is to develop a novel framework and a toolkit of protocols for enabling resource-constrained computers to play a vital role in ensuring the security properties of the decentralized system. The resource-constrained blockchain architectures developed over the course of this research will enable innovative blockchain solutions for Internet-of-Things, healthcare, supply-chains, and beyond, which will be of direct benefit to society. The techniques developed in this research will have a significant impact on how low-power mobile devices can participate in today's cryptocurrency networks, which will facilitate the mass adoption of the technology. The proposed work will be seamlessly integrated into education through course development and mentoring and will be disseminated to industry and at academic blockchain events. This proposal takes a principled and foundational approach to cutting down the resources consumed by large-scale blockchain systems. This proposal will develop novel blockchain architectures by taking a novel resource-centric approach and will combine cutting-edge techniques from cryptocurrencies with innovative ideas from coding and information theory and peer-to-peer networking to address several fundamental challenges in reducing the resource consumption in large-scale blockchain systems without compromising system security. In particular, the focus of the research is on (i) developing coding-theoretic architectures that limit the growth of storage space per node as a function of the size of the blockchain without affecting the security of bootstrapping new nodes; (ii) designing methodologies to empower computationally-constrained devices to 'collaboratively validate' blocks in a secure manner with a sub-linear number of computations in the size of a block; and (iii) developing a framework to analyze blockchain networks as content distribution networks, and thereby, allow network-constrained devices to optimize their network resources. The proposed architectures will be evaluated by integrating them with real-world blockchain systems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.