research-article

Erlay: Efficient Transaction Relay for Bitcoin

Authors:

Gregory Maxwell,

Alexandra Fedorova,

Ivan BeschastnikhAuthors Info & Claims

CCS '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Pages 817 - 831

https://doi.org/10.1145/3319535.3354237

Published: 06 November 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Bitcoin is a top-ranked cryptocurrency that has experienced huge growth and survived numerous attacks. The protocols making up Bitcoin must therefore accommodate the growth of the network and ensure security.

Security of the Bitcoin network depends on connectivity between the nodes. Higher connectivity yields better security. In this paper we make two observations: (1) current connectivity in the Bitcoin network is too low for optimal security; (2) at the same time, increasing connectivity will substantially increase the bandwidth used by the transaction dissemination protocol, making it prohibitively expensive to operate a Bitcoin node. Half of the total bandwidth needed to operate a Bitcoin node is currently used to just announce transactions. Unlike block relay, transaction dissemination has received little attention in prior work.

We propose a new transaction dissemination protocol, Erlay, that not only reduces the bandwidth consumption by 40% assuming current connectivity, but also keeps the bandwidth use almost constant as the connectivity increases. In contrast, the existing protocol increases the bandwidth consumption linearly with the number of connections. By allowing more connections at a small cost, Erlay improves the security of the Bitcoin network. And, as we demonstrate, Erlay also hardens the network against attacks that attempt to learn the origin node of a transaction. Erlay is currently being investigated by the Bitcoin community for future use with the Bitcoin protocol.

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Index Terms

Erlay: Efficient Transaction Relay for Bitcoin
1. Networks
  1. Network performance evaluation
    1. Network simulations
  2. Network protocols
    1. Application layer protocols
      1. Peer-to-peer protocols
2. Security and privacy
  1. Security services
  2. Systems security
    1. Denial-of-service attacks
    2. Distributed systems security

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cover image ACM Conferences

CCS '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

November 2019

2755 pages

ISBN:9781450367479

DOI:10.1145/3319535

General Chairs:
Lorenzo Cavallaro
King's College London, UK
,
Johannes Kinder
Bundeswehr University Munich, Germany
,
Program Chairs:
XiaoFeng Wang
Indiana University, USA
,
Jonathan Katz
George Mason University, USA

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

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Published: 06 November 2019

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CCS '19: 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

November 11 - 15, 2019

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CCS '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 149 of 934 submissions, 16%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,261 of 6,999 submissions, 18%

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