Abstract
Light clients for distributed ledger networks can verify blockchain integrity by downloading and analyzing blockchain headers. They are designed to circumvent the high resource requirements, i.e., the large bandwidth and memory requirements that full nodes must meet, which are unsuitable for consumer-grade hardware and resource-constrained devices. Light clients rely on full nodes and trust them implicitly. This leaves them vulnerable to various types of attacks, ranging from accepting maliciously forged data to Eclipse attacks. We introduce Aurora-Trinity, a novel version of light clients that addresses the above-mentioned vulnerability by relying on our original Aurora module, which extends the Ethereum Trinity client. The Aurora module efficiently discovers the presence of malicious or Byzantine nodes in distributed ledger networks with a predefined and acceptable error rate and identifies at least one honest node for persistent or ephemeral communication. The identified honest node is used to detect the latest canonical chain head or to infer the state of an entry in the ledger without downloading the header chain, making the Aurora-Trinity client extremely efficient. It can run on consumer-grade hardware and resource-constrained devices, as the Aurora module consumes about 0.31 MB of RAM and 1 MB of storage at runtime.
Highlights
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is one of the most striking discoveries in the field of distributed systems and digital asset management in recent years
Since we focus on light clients in this paper, we review distinguished DLT networks, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, to identify the available light client implementations
Since the Aurora algorithm depends on both the peer discovery mechanisms and block header information, we provide an overview of the two main peer-to-peer network protocols of the Ethereum network, namely, the Node Discovery Protocol (NDP) (NDP: Node Discovery Protocol v4, with NDP v5.1 marked as work in progress at the time of writing) and RLPx Transport Protocol (RLPx) (RLPx: https://github.com/ethereum/devp2 p/blob/master/rlpx.md, accessed on 11 February 2022), which facilitate peer discovery, the maintenance of routing tables and chain state
Summary
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is one of the most striking discoveries in the field of distributed systems and digital asset management in recent years. DLT enables the management of a Digital Ledger (DL) in a distributed environment where participating peers do not trust each other. Such a DL is immutable, fault tolerant and replication transparent. The subsequent major breakthrough offered by public and permissionless solutions, such as Ethereum, is the ability to execute arbitrary code within smart contracts [1]. This allows the technology to be used in a variety of areas, including healthcare, communication systems, decentralized finance, electronic voting, and the Internet of Things (IoT) [2]
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