Azouvi, S;
Danezis, G;
Nikolaenko, V;
(2020)
Winkle: Foiling Long-Range Attacks in Proof-of-Stake Systems.
In:
AFT 2020 - Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies.
(pp. pp. 189-201).
ACM: Association for Computing Machinery: New York, NY, USA.
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Abstract
Winkle protects any validator-based byzantine fault tolerant consensus mechanisms, such as those used in modern Proof-of-Stake blockchains, against long-range attacks where old validators' signature keys get compromised. Winkle is a decentralized secondary layer of client-based validation, where a client includes a single additional field into a transaction that they sign: a hash of the previously sequenced block. The block that gets a threshold of signatures (confirmations) weighted by clients' coins is called a "confirmed"checkpoint. We show that under plausible and flexible security assumptions about clients the confirmed checkpoints can not be equivocated. We discuss how client key rotation increases security, how to accommodate for coins' minting and how delegation allows for faster checkpoints. We evaluate checkpoint latency experimentally using Bitcoin and Ethereum transaction graphs, with and without delegation of stake.
| Type: | Proceedings paper |
|---|---|
| Title: | Winkle: Foiling Long-Range Attacks in Proof-of-Stake Systems |
| Event: | AFT 2020 - 2nd ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies |
| ISBN-13: | 9781450381390 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1145/3419614.3423260 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1145/3419614.3423260 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10172332 |
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