Blockguard: Adaptive Blockchain Security
This work addresses the need for efficient and scalable security in blockchain systems, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing consensus methods.
The paper tackles the problem of varying blockchain transaction security based on importance by using variable-size consensus committees that operate concurrently, and it presents two algorithms for adaptive security that achieve improved performance through evaluation.
We consider the problem of varying the security of blockchain transactions according to their importance. This adaptive security is achieved by using variable size consensus committees. To improve performance, such committees function concurrently. We present two algorithms that allow adaptive security by forming concurrent variable size consensus committees on demand. One is based on a single joint blockchain, the other is based on separate sharded blockchains. For in-committee consensus, our algorithms may use various available byzantine-robust fault tolerant algorithms (BFT). We implement synchronous BFT, asynchronous BFT and proof-of-work consensus. We thoroughly evaluate the performance of our adaptive security algorithms.