A Flexible n/2 Adversary Node Resistant and Halting Recoverable Blockchain Sharding Protocol
This addresses a critical security and performance problem for blockchain developers seeking scalable and resilient decentralized systems, though it appears incremental as it builds on prior sharding methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of achieving consensus in blockchain sharding systems with adversarial nodes, presenting an approach that withstands up to n/2 adversarial nodes and recovers from deadlocks, with performance analysis indicating high transaction throughput and low bandwidth requirements.
Blockchain sharding is a promising approach to solving the dilemma between decentralisation and high performance (transaction throughput) for blockchain. The main challenge of Blockchain sharding systems is how to reach a decision on a statement among a sub-group (shard) of people while ensuring the whole population recognises this statement. Namely, the challenge is to prevent an adversary who does not have the majority of nodes globally but have the majority of nodes inside a shard. Most Blockchain sharding approaches can only reach a correct consensus inside a shard with at most $n/3$ evil nodes in a $n$ node system. There is a blockchain sharding approach which can prevent an incorrect decision to be reached when the adversary does not have $n/2$ nodes globally. However, the system can be stopped from reaching consensus (become deadlocked) if the adversary controls a smaller number of nodes. In this paper, we present an improved Blockchain sharding approach that can withstand $n/2$ adversarial nodes and recover from deadlocks. The recovery is made by dynamically adjusting the number of shards and the shard size. A performance analysis suggests our approach has a high performance (transaction throughput) while requiring little bandwidth for synchronisation.