SPON: Enabling Resilient Inter-Ledgers Payments with an Intrusion-Tolerant Overlay
This addresses the need for fast, reliable, and secure cross-ledger payments, which is incremental as it builds on existing protocols like Interledger and Spines.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling global payments across multiple distributed ledgers by proposing SPON, a service that combines the Interledger protocol with an intrusion-tolerant overlay network to improve payment latency, achieve fault tolerance, and provide resilience to attacks like BGP hijacking.
Payment systems are a critical component of everyday life in our society. While in many situations payments are still slow, opaque, siloed, expensive or even fail, users expect them to be fast, transparent, cheap, reliable and global. Recent technologies such as distributed ledgers create opportunities for near-real-time, cheaper and more transparent payments. However, in order to achieve a global payment system, payments should be possible not only within one ledger, but also across different ledgers and geographies. In this paper we propose Secure Payments with Overlay Networks (SPON), a service that enables global payments across multiple ledgers by combining the transaction exchange provided by the Interledger protocol with an intrusion-tolerant overlay of relay nodes to achieve (1) improved payment latency, (2) fault tolerance to benign failures such as node failures and network partitions, and (3) resilience to BGP hijacking attacks. We discuss the design goals and present an implementation based on the Interledger protocol and Spines overlay network. We analyze the resilience of SPON and demonstrate through experimental evaluation that it is able to improve payment latency, recover from path outages, withstand network partition attacks, and disseminate payments fairly across multiple ledgers. We also show how SPON can be deployed to make the communication between different ledgers resilient to BGP hijacking attacks.