Omniledger: A secure, scale-out, decentralized ledger via sharding

E Kokoris-Kogias, P Jovanovic, L Gasser… - … IEEE symposium on …, 2018 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
2018 IEEE symposium on security and privacy (SP), 2018ieeexplore.ieee.org
Designing a secure permissionless distributed ledger (blockchain) that performs on par with
centralized payment processors, such as Visa, is a challenging task. Most existing
distributed ledgers are unable to scale-out, ie, to grow their total processing capacity with the
number of validators; and those that do, compromise security or decentralization. We
present OmniLedger, a novel scale-out distributed ledger that preserves longterm security
under permissionless operation. It ensures security and correctness by using a bias …
Designing a secure permissionless distributed ledger (blockchain) that performs on par with centralized payment processors, such as Visa, is a challenging task. Most existing distributed ledgers are unable to scale-out, i.e., to grow their total processing capacity with the number of validators; and those that do, compromise security or decentralization. We present OmniLedger, a novel scale-out distributed ledger that preserves longterm security under permissionless operation. It ensures security and correctness by using a bias-resistant public-randomness protocol for choosing large, statistically representative shards that process transactions, and by introducing an efficient cross-shard commit protocol that atomically handles transactions affecting multiple shards. OmniLedger also optimizes performance via parallel intra-shard transaction processing, ledger pruning via collectively-signed state blocks, and low-latency "trust-but-verify" validation for low-value transactions. An evaluation of our experimental prototype shows that OmniLedger's throughput scales linearly in the number of active validators, supporting Visa-level workloads and beyond, while confirming typical transactions in under two seconds.
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