The Security and Performance of Proof of Work Blockchains based on Simulated-Based LT Codes

• Main Authors: Chen, Ding-Ren, 陳鼎仁
• Other Authors: Wang, Jia-Shung
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/a6464b

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 資訊工程學系所 === 107 === The security provisions of the Proof of Work (PoW) blockchain system has been thoroughly analyzed in many researches, and the discussion and extension of the scalability limits of the system have also been found in some communities and literature. However, the research topic employing fountain codes to control/facilitate the transmission of blocks are not well discussed. Therefore, in this paper, the fountain codes (or rateless) are leveraged to improve the transmission ability of the blockchain system, and the impact on the security provisions and the performance of the system over the improved network environment are further analyzed. Fountain codes are a family of erasure codes where the rate can be adjusted on the fly. LT codes are the first realization of the fountain codes with the beneficial properties from it and having low computational complexity in both encoding/decoding as well. Blockchain system is structured as a peer-to-peer network architecture on top of the internet; the P2P means that there are no “special” nodes, no centralized service, and no hierarchy within the network. P2P networks are inherently resilient, open, and the computers are free to participate in the network which has its topology randomly constructed [18]. Due to the mentioned properties of the P2P network, the blockchain system encounters some transmission bottlenecks. We designed a block propagation model with the simulated-based LT codes transmission control mechanism which facilitates the transmission performance to analyze the security provisions and the limits of the scalability of the blockchain system. The results suggest that our proposed method performs a better network throughput, security provisions, scalability, and less redundancy.