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zkBridge: Trustless Cross-chain Bridges Made Practical

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Dawn SongAuthors Info & Claims

CCS '22: Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Pages 3003 - 3017

https://doi.org/10.1145/3548606.3560652

Published: 07 November 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Blockchains have seen growing traction with cryptocurrencies reaching a market cap of over 1 trillion dollars, major institution investors taking interests, and global impacts on governments, businesses, and individuals.

Also growing significantly is the heterogeneity of the ecosystem where a variety of blockchains co-exist. Cross-chain bridge is a necessary building block in this multi-chain ecosystem. Existing solutions, however, either suffer from performance issues or rely on honesty assumptions of committees that significantly lower the security. Recurring attacks against bridges have cost users more than 1.5 billion USD. In this paper, we introduce zkBridge, an efficient cross-chain bridge that guarantees strong security without extra trust assumptions. With succinct proofs, zkBridge not only guarantees correctness, but also significantly reduces on-chain verification cost. We propose novel succinct proof protocols that are orders-of-magnitude faster than existing solutions for workload in zkBridge. With a modular design, zkBridge enables a few useful capabilities, including message passing, token transferring, and other computational logic operating on state changes from different chains. We fully implemented zkBridge between Cosmos and Ethereum and evaluated the end-to-end performance. The experiment shows that zkBridge achieves practical performance: it can generate a block header proof within 2 minutes, while verifying proofs on-chain costs less than 220K gas (the same as Groth16). Relaying a transaction from Cosmos to Ethereum costs 210K gas.

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Cited By

Ante LSaggu A(2024)Time-Varying Bidirectional Causal Relationships between Transaction Fees and Economic Activity of Subsystems Utilizing the Ethereum Blockchain NetworkJournal of Risk and Financial Management10.3390/jrfm1701001917:1(19)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/jrfm17010019
Wiraatmaja CKasahara S(2024)Scalable Anonymous Authentication Scheme Based on Zero-Knowledge Set-Membership ProofDistributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice10.1145/3676285Online publication date: 2-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3676285
Yu TLuo FRanzi G(2024)PCCAE: A Protocol for Multi-Party Asset Exchange Among BlockchainsProceedings of the SIGCOMM Workshop on Zero Trust Architecture for Next Generation Communications10.1145/3672200.3673875(13-18)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3672200.3673875
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Index Terms

zkBridge: Trustless Cross-chain Bridges Made Practical
1. Security and privacy
  1. Software and application security

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cover image ACM Conferences

CCS '22: Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

November 2022

3598 pages

ISBN:9781450394505

DOI:10.1145/3548606

General Chairs:
Heng Yin
University of California, Riverside
,
Angelos Stavrou
Virginia Tech
,
Program Chairs:
Cas Cremers
CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
,
Elaine Shi
Carnegie Mellon University

Copyright © 2022 Owner/Author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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SIGSAC: ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit, and Control

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 07 November 2022

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National Science Foundation
Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, University of California Berkeley
DARPA
the Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence at Berkeley
Simons Foundation

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CCS '22: 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

November 7 - 11, 2022

CA, Los Angeles, USA

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

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ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

October 14 - 18, 2024

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https://doi.org/10.3390/jrfm17010019
Wiraatmaja CKasahara S(2024)Scalable Anonymous Authentication Scheme Based on Zero-Knowledge Set-Membership ProofDistributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice10.1145/3676285Online publication date: 2-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3676285
Yu TLuo FRanzi G(2024)PCCAE: A Protocol for Multi-Party Asset Exchange Among BlockchainsProceedings of the SIGCOMM Workshop on Zero Trust Architecture for Next Generation Communications10.1145/3672200.3673875(13-18)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3672200.3673875
Xu MGuo YLiu CHu QYu DXiong ZNiyato DCheng X(2024)Exploring Blockchain Technology through a Modular Lens: A SurveyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/365728856:9(1-39)Online publication date: 8-May-2024
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Tran TVo KPhan DTan CPham V(2024)ChainSniper: A Machine Learning Approach for Auditing Cross-Chain Smart ContractsProceedings of the 2024 9th International Conference on Intelligent Information Technology10.1145/3654522.3654577(223-230)Online publication date: 23-Feb-2024
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Liao ZNan YLiang HHao SZhai JWu JZheng Z(2024)SmartAxe: Detecting Cross-Chain Vulnerabilities in Bridge Smart Contracts via Fine-Grained Static AnalysisProceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering10.1145/36437381:FSE(249-270)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2024
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Huang CYan TTessone CChua TNgo CKumar RLauw HKa-Wei Lee R(2024)Seamlessly Transferring Assets through Layer-0 Bridges: An Empirical Analysis of Stargate Bridge's Architecture and DynamicsCompanion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589335.3651964(1776-1784)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
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Chen YAsheralieva AWei X(2024)AtomCI: A New System for the Atomic Cross-Chain Smart Contract Invocation Spanning Heterogeneous BlockchainsIEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering10.1109/TNSE.2023.334919211:3(2782-2796)Online publication date: May-2024
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Jiang PZhu JZhu L(2024)Balancing Privacy and Regulation of Cross-Chain Transaction Systems via SoK-Assisted Policy EnhancementIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2024.340215019(5620-5629)Online publication date: 2024
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