Cross-Channel: Scalable Off-Chain Channels Supporting Fair and Atomic Cross-Chain Operations

Cross-chain technology facilitates the interoperability among isolated blockchains on which users can freely communicate and transfer values. Existing cross-chain protocols suffer from the scalability problem when processing on-chain transactions. Off-chain channels, as a promising blockchain scaling technique, can enable micro-payment transactions without involving on-chain transaction settlement. However, existing channel schemes can only be applied to operations within a single blockchain, failing to support cross-chain services. Therefore in this paper, we propose Cross-Channel, the first off-chain channel to support cross-chain services. We introduce a novel hierarchical channel structure, a new hierarchical settlement protocol, and a smart general fair exchange protocol, to ensure scalability, fairness, and atomicity of cross-chain interactions. Besides, Cross-Channel provides strong security and practicality by avoiding high latency in asynchronous networks. Through a 50-instance deployment of Cross-Channel on AliCloud, we demonstrate that Cross-Channel is well-suited for processing cross-chain transactions in high-frequency and large-scale, and brings a significantly enhanced throughput with a small amount of gas and delay overhead.

[1]  Xiuzhen Cheng,et al.  SPDL: A Blockchain-Enabled Secure and Privacy-Preserving Decentralized Learning System , 2023, IEEE Transactions on Computers.

[2]  Xiaodong Lin,et al.  Blockchain-Cloud Transparent Data Marketing: Consortium Management and Fairness , 2022, IEEE Transactions on Computers.

[3]  Ningjiang Chen,et al.  Workload-based Randomization Byzantine Fault Tolerance Consensus Protocol , 2022, High-Confidence Computing.

[4]  L. Tassiulas,et al.  Payment Channel Networks: Single-Hop Scheduling for Throughput Maximization , 2022, IEEE INFOCOM 2022 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications.

[5]  Xiaodong Qi.  S-Store: A Scalable Data Store towards Permissioned Blockchain Sharding , 2022, IEEE INFOCOM 2022 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications.

[6]  Zibin Zheng,et al.  BrokerChain: A Cross-Shard Blockchain Protocol for Account/Balance-based State Sharding , 2022, IEEE INFOCOM 2022 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications.

[7]  Yourong Chen,et al.  A Survey on Blockchain Systems: Attacks, Defenses, and Privacy Preservation , 2021, High-Confidence Computing.

[8]  Chao Zhang,et al.  ZKCPlus: Optimized Fair-exchange Protocol Supporting Practical and Flexible Data Exchange , 2021, CCS.

[9]  Yang Feng,et al.  Smart Contract Development: Challenges and Opportunities , 2021, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[10]  Xiuzhen Cheng,et al.  When Blockchain Meets Smart Grids: A Comprehensive Survey , 2021, High-Confidence Computing.

[11]  Jiguo Yu,et al.  CloudChain: A Cloud Blockchain Using Shared Memory Consensus and RDMA , 2021, IEEE Transactions on Computers.

[12]  Pedro Moreno-Sanchez,et al.  Bitcoin-Compatible Virtual Channels , 2021, 2021 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP).

[13]  Toshiaki Miyazaki,et al.  Secure Balance Planning of Off-blockchain Payment Channel Networks , 2020, IEEE INFOCOM 2020 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications.

[14]  Ittay Eyal,et al.  MAD-HTLC: Because HTLC is Crazy-Cheap to Attack , 2020, 2021 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP).

[15]  Miguel Correia,et al.  A Survey on Blockchain Interoperability: Past, Present, and Future Trends , 2020, ACM Comput. Surv..

[16]  Domenic Forte,et al.  SCRIPT , 2020, ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems.

[17]  F. Richard Yu,et al.  A Survey on the Scalability of Blockchain Systems , 2019, IEEE Network.

[18]  Stefan Dziembowski,et al.  Multi-party Virtual State Channels , 2019, EUROCRYPT.

[19]  Stefan Dziembowski,et al.  Perun: Virtual Payment Hubs over Cryptocurrencies , 2019, 2019 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP).

[20]  Stefan Dziembowski,et al.  FairSwap: How To Fairly Exchange Digital Goods , 2018, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..

[21]  Stefan Dziembowski,et al.  General State Channel Networks , 2018, CCS.

[22]  Giulio Malavolta,et al.  Concurrency and Privacy with Payment-Channel Networks , 2017, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..

[23]  Matthew Green,et al.  Bolt: Anonymous Payment Channels for Decentralized Currencies , 2017, CCS.

[24]  Rami Khalil,et al.  Revive: Rebalancing Off-Blockchain Payment Networks , 2017, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..

[25]  Iddo Bentov,et al.  Sprites and State Channels: Payment Networks that Go Faster Than Lightning , 2017, Financial Cryptography.

[26]  Martin R. Albrecht,et al.  MiMC: Efficient Encryption and Cryptographic Hashing with Minimal Multiplicative Complexity , 2016, ASIACRYPT.

[27]  Jens Groth,et al.  On the Size of Pairing-Based Non-interactive Arguments , 2016, EUROCRYPT.

[28]  Christian Decker,et al.  A Fast and Scalable Payment Network with Bitcoin Duplex Micropayment Channels , 2015, SSS.

[29]  Peng Ning,et al.  2008 International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks TinyECC: A Configurable Library for Elliptic Curve Cryptography in Wireless Sensor Networks ∗ , 2022 .

[30]  Torben P. Pedersen.  Non-Interactive and Information-Theoretic Secure Verifiable Secret Sharing , 1991, CRYPTO.

[31]  Ling Ren,et al.  Practical Asynchronous High-threshold Distributed Key Generation and Distributed Polynomial Sampling , 2022, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..

[32]  Aggelos Kiayias,et al.  Hydra: Fast Isomorphic State Channels , 2020, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..

[33]  DR. Gavin Wood.  POLKADOT: VISION FOR A HETEROGENEOUS MULTI-CHAIN FRAMEWORK , 2016 .

[34]  Daniel Davis Wood,et al.  ETHEREUM: A SECURE DECENTRALISED GENERALISED TRANSACTION LEDGER , 2014 .

[35]  S. Nakamoto,et al.  Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System , 2008 .