TY - GEN
T1 - Pisa
T2 - 1st ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies, AFT 2019
AU - McCorry, Patrick
AU - Bakshi, Surya
AU - Bentov, Iddo
AU - Meiklejohn, Sarah
AU - Miller, Andrew
N1 - Funding Information:
Patrick McCorry and Sarah Meiklejohn are supported in part by EPSRC grant EP/N028104/1. Andrew Miller is partially supported by gifts from Jump Labs and from CME Group. We would like to thank Lefteris Karapetsas for bringing the problem to our attention, the wider Raiden team for feedback during the development of Pisa, and both Chris Buckland and Salvatore Ingala for their continued work on PISA.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.
PY - 2019/10/21
Y1 - 2019/10/21
N2 - State channels are a leading approach for improving the scalability of blockchains and cryptocurrencies. They allow a group of distrustful parties to optimistically execute an application-defined program amongst themselves, while the blockchain serves as a backstop in case of a dispute or abort. This effectively bypasses the congestion, fees and performance constraints of the underlying blockchain in the typical case. However, state channels introduce a new and undesirable assumption that a party must remain on-line and synchronised with the blockchain at all times to defend against execution fork attacks. An execution fork can revert a state channel’s history, potentially causing financial damage to a party that is innocent except for having crashed. To provide security even to parties that may go off-line for an extended period of time, we present Pisa, the first protocol to propose an accountable third party who can be hired by parties to cancel execution forks on their behalf. To evaluate Pisa, we provide a proof-of-concept implementation for a simplified Sprites and we demonstrate that it is cost-efficient to deploy on the Ethereum network.
AB - State channels are a leading approach for improving the scalability of blockchains and cryptocurrencies. They allow a group of distrustful parties to optimistically execute an application-defined program amongst themselves, while the blockchain serves as a backstop in case of a dispute or abort. This effectively bypasses the congestion, fees and performance constraints of the underlying blockchain in the typical case. However, state channels introduce a new and undesirable assumption that a party must remain on-line and synchronised with the blockchain at all times to defend against execution fork attacks. An execution fork can revert a state channel’s history, potentially causing financial damage to a party that is innocent except for having crashed. To provide security even to parties that may go off-line for an extended period of time, we present Pisa, the first protocol to propose an accountable third party who can be hired by parties to cancel execution forks on their behalf. To evaluate Pisa, we provide a proof-of-concept implementation for a simplified Sprites and we demonstrate that it is cost-efficient to deploy on the Ethereum network.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85074786002&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85074786002&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3318041.3355461
DO - 10.1145/3318041.3355461
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85074786002
T3 - AFT 2019 - Proceedings of the 1st ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies
SP - 16
EP - 30
BT - AFT 2019 - Proceedings of the 1st ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 21 October 2019 through 23 October 2019
ER -