OverChain: Building a robust overlay with a blockchain
Vijeth Aradhya, Seth Gilbert, Aquinas Hobor

TL;DR
OverChain proposes a blockchain-based overlay network that ensures Byzantine fault tolerance, high connectivity, and robustness against adversarial failures, even with high churn and limited resources.
Contribution
It introduces a novel, blockchain-assisted, communication-efficient protocol for maintaining a resilient hypercubic network among peers, capable of recovering from substantial adversarial failures.
Findings
Network maintains high connectivity despite churn.
Protocol tolerates maximum churn rate within log factors.
Network recovers from significant adversarial failures.
Abstract
Blockchains use peer-to-peer networks for disseminating information among peers, but these networks currently do not have any provable guarantees for desirable properties such as Byzantine fault tolerance, good connectivity and small diameter. This is not just a theoretical problem, as recent works have exploited unsafe peer connection policies and weak network synchronization to mount partitioning attacks on Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency blockchains are safety critical systems, so we need principled algorithms to maintain their networks. Our key insight is that we can leverage the blockchain itself to share information among the peers, and thus simplify the network maintenance process. Given that the peers have restricted computational resources, and at most a constant fraction of them are Byzantine, we provide communication-efficient protocols to maintain a hypercubic network for…
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Taxonomy
TopicsBlockchain Technology Applications and Security · Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies · Caching and Content Delivery
