Using Homomorphic hashes in coded blockchains

TL;DR

This paper introduces homomorphic hashes into coded blockchains to enable quick detection of maliciously propagated erroneous fragments, enhancing security without compromising scalability.

Contribution

The paper proposes integrating homomorphic hashes into coded blockchains, providing a novel method for instant error detection and improving security against malicious nodes.

Findings

Homomorphic hashes enable real-time error detection in coded blockchains.

The proposed system maintains low complexity as shown by theoretical analysis.

Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the error detection mechanism.

Abstract

One of the scalability issues of blockchains is the increase of their sizes which can prevent users from storing them and thus from contributing to the decentralization effort. Recent works developed the concept of coded blockchains, which allow users to store only some coded fragments of the blockchains. However, this solution is not protected against malicious nodes that can propagate erroneous coded fragments. We propose in the paper to add homomorphic hashes to this system. This allows for instantaneous detection of erroneous fragments and thus avoids decoding with wrong data. We describe the integration of this mechanism in coded blockchains and we evaluate its complexity theoretically and by simulation.