On the security and performance of next-generation blockchains
department or school: Applied Science, Faculty of
department or school: Engineering, School of (Okanagan)
data provider: DSpace
degree campus: UBCO
creator: Niu, Jianyu
issued: 2021-07-20T21:58:15Z
issued: 2021
related degree: Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
degree grantor: University of British Columbia
description: Bitcoin also known as the first-generation blockchain protocol, has suffered from scalability barriers. For example, Bitcoin can only process $7$ transactions per second, and users have to wait up to one hour to confirm transactions. To address this, Ethereum, Bitcoin-NG, and HotStuff (also known as the next-generation blockchains) are proposed. Each protocol represents an elegant approach and has further influenced many subsequent blockchain protocols. Informally speaking, Ethereum promotes Bitcoin's scalability by elaborately tuning system parameters (e.g., block production rate); Bitcoin-NG achieves better scalability by decoupling Bitcoin's blockchain operation into two planes: leader election and transaction serialization; HotStuff differs from Bitcoin by renovating classic Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) consensus protocol. However, the security and performance of these protocols have not been fully explored in the literature. Specifically, Ethereum introduces the so-called uncle and nephew rewards on top of the (standard) block rewards used in Bitcoin, making the analysis of the selfish mining attack in Bitcoin hard to be directly applied to Ethereum. This calls for new analysis. In this dissertation, a 2-dimensional Markov process is proposed to model the selfish mining attack. Besides, a probabilistic reward computing method is used to tracks block rewards. Bitcoin-NG relies on two types of blocks (namely, key blocks and microblocks) to realize the leader election and transaction serialization. However, an in-depth incentive analysis is still missing to evaluate the impact of these types of blocks under network capacity constraints. To address this, the interval between two consecutive key blocks is modeled as an exponential random variable, and the generation rate of microblocks is introduced to capture the impact of network capacity. Besides, a Markov decision process (MDP) model is used to jointly analyze the incentive of key blocks and microblock. HotSt…
aggregated CHO: https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/79053
note: On the Security and Performance ofNext-Generation BlockchainsbyJianyu NiuM.A.Sc., Northwestern Polytechnical University, 2017B.Sc., Northwestern Polytechnical University, 2014A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OFTHE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OFDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHYinTHE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES(Electrical Engineering)THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA(Okanagan)July 2021© Jianyu Niu, 2021The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to theCollege of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis/dissertation entitled:On the Security and Performance of Next-Generation Blockchainssubmitted by Jianyu Niu in partial fulfilment of the requirements of thedegree of Doctor of Philosophy.Dr. Chen Feng, School of Engineering, The University of British ColumbiaSupervisorDr. Julian Cheng, School of Engineering, The University of British ColumbiaSupervisory Committee MemberDr. Zheng Liu, School of Engineering, The University of British ColumbiaSupervisory Committee MemberDr. Apurva Narayan, Computer Science, The University of British ColumbiaUniversity ExaminerDr. Majid Khabbazian, Electrical & Computer Engineering, The University of AlbertaExternal ExamineriiAbstractBitcoin also known as the first-generation blockchain protocol, has suf-fered from scalability barriers. For example, Bitcoin can only process 7transactions per second, and users have to wait up to one hour to confirmtransactions. To address this, Ethereum, Bitcoin-NG, and HotStuff (alsoknown as the next-generation blockchains) are proposed. Each protocolrepresents an elegant approach and has further influenced many subsequentblockchain protocols. Informally speaking, Ethereum promotes Bitcoin’sscalability by elaborately tuning system parameters (e.g., block produc-tion rate); Bitcoin-NG achieves better scalability by decoupling Bitcoin’sblockchain operation into two planes: leader election and transaction serial-ization; HotStuff differs from Bitcoin by renovating classic Byzantine fault…
has type: Thesis/Dissertation
date issued: 2021-09
is shown at: 10.14288/1.0400496
language: eng
degree discipline: Electrical Engineering
provider: Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
publisher: University of British Columbia
rights: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
rights URI: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
scholar level: Graduate
contributor: Feng, Chen
type: Text
identifier URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/79053