EAGER: SaTC: CORE: Small: Blockchain Architectures for Resource-Constrained Devices

区块链是一个大规模分布式、不可变的数据库，包含可验证的交易记录。虽然区块链技术已成为比特币和以太等加密货币的基础技术，但由于它能够以完全分散、安全和不可信任的方式维护权威记录，因此它在许多社会环境(如医疗保健、供应链和物联网)中具有深远影响。然而，尽管区块链技术前景看好，但区块链应用扩散的主要障碍之一是，目前的区块链设计在存储、计算和通信方面都是资源密集型的。该项目的目标是开发一个新的框架和一个协议工具包，使资源有限的计算机能够在确保分散系统的安全特性方面发挥至关重要的作用。在本研究过程中开发的资源受限的区块链架构将为物联网、医疗保健、供应链等领域提供创新的区块链解决方案，从而直接造福社会。这项研究开发的技术将对低功耗移动设备如何参与当今的加密货币网络产生重大影响，这将促进该技术的大规模采用。拟议的工作将通过课程开发和指导无缝地融入教育，并将在行业和学术区块链活动中传播。该建议采取了一种原则性和基础性的方法来减少大规模区块链系统消耗的资源。该提案将通过采用新的以资源为中心的方法来开发新的区块链架构，并将加密货币的尖端技术与编码和信息理论以及对等网络的创新想法相结合，以解决在不损害系统安全的情况下降低大规模区块链系统的资源消耗的几个根本挑战。特别是，研究的重点是(I)开发编码理论体系结构，以区块链大小的函数来限制每个节点的存储空间的增长，而不影响引导新节点的安全性；(Ii)设计方法，使计算受限的设备能够以安全的方式使用块大小的次线性计算以安全的方式“协作验证”块；以及(Iii)开发一个框架，将区块链网络分析为内容分发网络，从而允许网络受限的设备优化其网络资源。建议的架构将通过将它们与现实世界的区块链系统相结合进行评估。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

A blockchain is a massively distributed, immutable database containing verifiable records of transactions. While the blockchain technology has emerged as the foundational technology for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, it has far-reaching implications in numerous societal settings (such as in healthcare, supply-chains, and the Internet-of-Things) due to its ability to maintain authoritative records in a fully decentralized, secure, and trustless manner. However, despite being such a promising technology, one of the main roadblocks in the proliferation of blockchain applications is that current blockchain designs are resource-intensive, in terms of storage, computation, and communication. The goal of this project is to develop a novel framework and a toolkit of protocols for enabling resource-constrained computers to play a vital role in ensuring the security properties of the decentralized system. The resource-constrained blockchain architectures developed over the course of this research will enable innovative blockchain solutions for Internet-of-Things, healthcare, supply-chains, and beyond, which will be of direct benefit to society. The techniques developed in this research will have a significant impact on how low-power mobile devices can participate in today's cryptocurrency networks, which will facilitate the mass adoption of the technology. The proposed work will be seamlessly integrated into education through course development and mentoring and will be disseminated to industry and at academic blockchain events.This proposal takes a principled and foundational approach to cutting down the resources consumed by large-scale blockchain systems. This proposal will develop novel blockchain architectures by taking a novel resource-centric approach and will combine cutting-edge techniques from cryptocurrencies with innovative ideas from coding and information theory and peer-to-peer networking to address several fundamental challenges in reducing the resource consumption in large-scale blockchain systems without compromising system security. In particular, the focus of the research is on (i) developing coding-theoretic architectures that limit the growth of storage space per node as a function of the size of the blockchain without affecting the security of bootstrapping new nodes; (ii) designing methodologies to empower computationally-constrained devices to 'collaboratively validate' blocks in a secure manner with a sub-linear number of computations in the size of a block; and (iii) developing a framework to analyze blockchain networks as content distribution networks, and thereby, allow network-constrained devices to optimize their network resources. The proposed architectures will be evaluated by integrating them with real-world blockchain systems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.