SNACKs: Proofs of Sequentiality for Light-Client Blockchain Protocols

[Dionysis Zindros]

For tomorrow, we are back to our usual time, 18:00 Greek time. The following is a very interesting paper on a topic very close to my heart -- superlight clients. I hope to see you all there.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, June 16, 2021, 03:00 PM UTC, Hamza Abusalah from TU Wien will present "SNACKs: Proofs of Sequentiality for Light-Client Blockchain Protocols".

Abstract: The remarkable success of blockchain technologies has resulted in ever-growing blockchains that are stored by all participating full nodes. On the other hand, nodes called light clients only store a very limited amount of blockchain-related data, and rely on the mediation of full nodes whenever interacting with the blockchain. It is essential for broader adoption of blockchains to design protocols that allow this interaction to be trustless from the light-client perspective.

In this work, we revisit the problem of designing light-client blockchain protocols and approach it from the perspective of classical proof system theory, resulting in a framework that allows to quantify the security guarantees provided to a verifier (a light client) even when interacting only with a single dishonest prover (a full node). More precisely, we define a new general primitive called succinct non-interactive argument of chain knowledge (SNACK) capturing this intuition, and show how to augment any blockchain with a graph-labeling proof of sequential work (GL-PoSW) to enable SNACK proofs for this blockchain. Along the way, we provide a unified and extended definition of GL-PoSW covering all previous constructions, and describe two new variants of GL-PoSWs suitable for our application. We show how SNACKs can be used to construct light-client blockchain protocols and compare to existing solutions.

Join here: https://zoom.us/j/99659360882?pwd=cDJzS3BoVGh0eWZpV0J6cG1rd2ZxUT09

Password: P4LXiA

More seminars: https://decrypto.org/seminar