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，包含可验证的事务记录。虽然区块链技术已经成为比特币和以太坊等加密货币的基础技术，但由于能够以完全分散、安全和无需信任的方式维护权威记录，它在许多社会环境（如医疗保健、供应链和物联网）中具有深远的影响。然而，尽管区块链是一项如此有前途的技术，但阻碍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、计算和通信方面是资源密集型的。该项目的目标是开发一个新的框架和协议工具包，使资源受限的计算机在确保分散系统的安全属性方面发挥重要作用。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，这将直接造福于社会。本研究中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整合到教育中，并将在工业界和学术bbb100活动中传播。该建议采用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颖的以资源为中心的方法开发新颖的区块链架构，并将加密货币的尖端技术与编码和信息理论以及点对点网络的创新思想相结合，以解决在不影响系统安全性的情况下减少大规模区块链系统资源消耗的几个基本挑战。特别是，研究的重点是(i)开发编码理论架构，限制每个节点的存储空间增长作为区块链大小的函数，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“协同验证”区块，并在区块大小上进行次线性的计算；（iii）开发一个框架来分析区块链网络作为内容分发网络，从而允许网络受限的设备优化其网络资源。将通过将建议的体系结构与实际的区块链系统集成来评估它们。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.