Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]

skip to main content
survey

A Survey on Cross-chain Technologies

Published: 08 June 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Blockchain has attracted more and more attention of academia, industry, and government in recent decades. Different usage demands have inspired various blockchain designs, forming different blockchain systems, which leads to information islands. Many cross-chain technologies have been proposed to link different blockchains together and expand the utility of blockchain. Nevertheless, the cross-chain technology is still in its infancy, which faces many problems that retard its wide application, for example, the issues related to security, privacy, and effectiveness. In order to further investigate cross-chain technologies, it is essential to understand its current state of arts. Although there are some surveys about cross-chain technologies driven by specific demands, the literature still lacks a comprehensive survey focusing on security, privacy, and effectiveness of cross-chain technologies. In this paper, we provide a review on existing cross-chain technologies based on a comprehensive set of criteria on security, privacy, and other performance. We first propose a blockchain interoperability architecture for the purpose of analyzing potential threats and problems regarding security, privacy, and effectiveness. We then summarize a set of criteria regarding these quality attributes. Next, we comprehensively review the representative works on cross-chain technologies according to a taxonomy based on applied types of techniques and cross-chain purposes. In each work review, we provide a serious discussion on its pros and cons by employing our proposed criteria. Finally, based on our review and analysis, we figure out a number of open issues and step ahead to direct future research directions on cross-chain technologies.

References

[1]
Elli Androulaki, Artem Barger, Vita Bortnikov, Christian Cachin, Konstantinos Christidis, Angelo De Caro, David Enyeart, Christopher Ferris, Gennady Laventman, Yacov Manevich, et al. 2018. Hyperledger fabric: A distributed operating system for permissioned blockchains. In Proceedings of theThirteenth EuroSys Conference. 1–15.
[2]
Adam Back, Matt Corallo, Luke Dashjr, Mark Friedenbach, Gregory Maxwell, Andrew Miller, Andrew Poelstra, Jorge Timón, and Pieter Wuille. 2014. Enabling blockchain innovations with pegged sidechains. http://www.opensciencereview.com/papers/123/enablingblockchain-innovations-with-pegged-sidechains. 72 (2014).
[3]
Foteini Baldimtsi, Ian Miers, and Xinyuan Zhang. 2021. Anonymous sidechains. In Data Privacy Management, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology. Springer, 262–277.
[4]
Rafael Belchior, André Vasconcelos, Sérgio Guerreiro, and Miguel Correia. 2021. A survey on blockchain interoperability: Past, present, and future trends. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) 54, 8 (2021), 1–41.
[5]
Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Eran Tromer, and Madars Virza. 2014. Succinct non-interactive zero knowledge for a von Neumann architecture. In 23rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 14). 781–796.
[6]
Iddo Bentov, Yan Ji, Fan Zhang, Lorenz Breidenbach, Philip Daian, and Ari Juels. 2019. Tesseract: Real-time cryptocurrency exchange using trusted hardware. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. 1521–1538.
[7]
Dan Boneh, Ben Lynn, and Hovav Shacham. 2001. Short signatures from the Weil pairing. In International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security. Springer, 514–532.
[8]
Michael Borkowski, Marten Sigwart, Philipp Frauenthaler, Taneli Hukkinen, and Stefan Schulte. 2019. DeXTT: Deterministic cross-blockchain token transfers. IEEE Access 7 (2019), 111030–111042.
[9]
BTC Relay. (2015). Retrieved May 27, 2022 from http://btcrelay.org/.
[10]
Vitalik Buterin. 2016. Chain interoperability. R3 Research Paper 9 (2016).
[11]
Tao-Hung Chang and Davor Svetinovic. 2016. Data analysis of digital currency networks: Namecoin case study. In 2016 21st International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems (ICECCS). IEEE, 122–125.
[12]
Huashan Chen, Marcus Pendleton, Laurent Njilla, and Shouhuai Xu. 2020. A survey on Ethereum systems security: Vulnerabilities, attacks, and defenses. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) 53, 3 (2020), 1–43.
[13]
Victor Costan and Srinivas Devadas. 2016. Intel SGX explained. Cryptology ePrint Archive (2016).
[14]
Christian Decker, Jochen Seidel, and Roger Wattenhofer. 2016. Bitcoin meets strong consistency. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking. 1–10.
[15]
Christian Decker and Roger Wattenhofer. 2013. Information propagation in the Bitcoin network. In IEEE P2P 2013 Proceedings. IEEE, 1–10.
[16]
Thuat Do, Thao Nguyen, and Hung Pham. 2019. Delegated proof of reputation: A novel blockchain consensus. In Proceedings of the 2019 International Electronics Communication Conference. 90–98.
[17]
John R. Douceur. 2002. The Sybil attack. In International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems. Springer, 251–260.
[18]
Jacob Eberhardt and Stefan Tai. 2018. Zokrates-scalable privacy-preserving off-chain computations. In 2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData). IEEE, 1084–1091.
[20]
FISCO-BCOS. (2017). Retrieved March 5, 2022 from http://www.fisco-bcos.org/.
[21]
Philipp Frauenthaler, Marten Sigwart, Christof Spanring, Michael Sober, and Stefan Schulte. 2020. ETH relay: A cost-efficient relay for Ethereum-based blockchains. In 2020 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain). IEEE, 204–213.
[22]
Enrique Fynn, Alysson Bessani, and Fernando Pedone. 2020. Smart contracts on the move. In 2020 50th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN). IEEE, 233–244.
[23]
Alberto Garoffolo, Dmytro Kaidalov, and Roman Oliynykov. 2020. Zendoo: A zk-SNARK verifiable cross-chain transfer protocol enabling decoupled and decentralized sidechains. (2020). arxiv:2002.01847.
[24]
Bishakh Chandra Ghosh, Tanay Bhartia, Sourav Kanti Addya, and Sandip Chakraborty. 2021. Leveraging public-private blockchain interoperability for closed consortium interfacing. In IEEE INFOCOM 2021-IEEE Conference on Computer Communications. IEEE, 1–10.
[25]
Runchao Han, Haoyu Lin, and Jiangshan Yu. 2019. On the optionality and fairness of Atomic Swaps. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies. 62–75.
[26]
Rui Han, Jiang Xiao, Xiaohai Dai, Shijie Zhang, Yi Sun, Baochun Li, and Hai Jin. 2021. Vassago: Efficient and authenticated provenance query on multiple blockchains. In 2021 40th International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS). IEEE, 132–142.
[27]
Thomas Hardjono, Alexander Lipton, and Alex Pentland. 2019. Toward an interoperability architecture for blockchain autonomous systems. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management 67, 4 (2019), 1298–1309.
[28]
Yunhua He, Cui Zhang, Bin Wu, Yigang Yang, Ke Xiao, and Hong Li. 2021. A cross-chain trusted reputation scheme for a shared charging platform based on blockchain. IEEE Internet of Things Journal (2021).
[29]
Yunhua He, Cui Zhang, Bin Wu, Yigang Yang, Ke Xiao, and Hong Li. 2021. Cross-chain trusted service quality computing scheme for multi-chain model-based 5G network slicing SLA. IEEE Internet of Things Journal (2021).
[30]
Ethan Heilman, Sebastien Lipmann, and Sharon Goldberg. 2020. The Arwen trading protocols. In International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Springer, 156–173.
[31]
Maurice Herlihy. 2018. Atomic cross-chain swaps. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing. 245–254.
[32]
Ivan Homoliak, Sarad Venugopalan, Daniël Reijsbergen, Qingze Hum, Richard Schumi, and Pawel Szalachowski. 2020. The security reference architecture for blockchains: Toward a standardized model for studying vulnerabilities, threats, and defenses. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 23, 1 (2020), 341–390.
[33]
Hai Jin, Xiaohai Dai, and Jiang Xiao. 2018. Towards a novel architecture for enabling interoperability amongst multiple blockchains. In 2018 IEEE 38th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS). IEEE, 1203–1211.
[34]
Niclas Kannengießer, Michelle Pfister, Malte Greulich, Sebastian Lins, and Ali Sunyaev. 2020. Bridges between Islands: Cross-Chain technology for distributed ledger technology. In Proceedings of the 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
[35]
Ghassan O. Karame, Elli Androulaki, and Srdjan Capkun. 2012. Double-spending fast payments in Bitcoin. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security. 906–917.
[36]
Aggelos Kiayias, Alexander Russell, Bernardo David, and Roman Oliynykov. 2017. Ouroboros: A provably secure proof-of-stake blockchain protocol. In Annual International Cryptology Conference. Springer, 357–388.
[37]
Sunny King and Scott Nadal. 2012. PPCoin: Peer-to-peer crypto-currency with proof-of-stake. Self-published paper, August 19, 1 (2012).
[38]
Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias, Philipp Jovanovic, Nicolas Gailly, Ismail Khoffi, Linus Gasser, and Bryan Ford. 2016. Enhancing Bitcoin security and performance with strong consistency via collective signing. In 25th Usenix Security Symposium (Usenix Security 16). 279–296.
[39]
Litecoin 2011. Litecoin Foundation. (2011). Retrieved May 27, 2022 from https://www.litecoin.net/.
[40]
Ye Liu, Xiaoyuan Ma, Lei Shu, Gerhard Petrus Hancke, and Adnan M. Abu-Mahfouz. 2020. From Industry 4.0 to Agriculture 4.0: Current status, enabling technologies, and research challenges. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics 17, 6 (2020), 4322–4334.
[41]
Ankur Lohachab, Saurabh Garg, Byeong Kang, Muhammad Bilal Amin, Junmin Lee, Shiping Chen, and Xiwei Xu. 2021. Towards interconnected blockchains: A comprehensive review of the role of interoperability among disparate blockchains. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) 54, 7 (2021), 1–39.
[42]
Léonard Lys, Arthur Micoulet, and Maria Potop-Butucaru. 2019. Atomic swapping Bitcoins and Ethers. In 2019 38th Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS). IEEE, 372–3722. DOI:
[43]
Damiano Di Francesco Maesa and Paolo Mori. 2020. Blockchain 3.0 applications survey. J. Parallel and Distrib. Comput. 138 (2020), 99–114.
[44]
Ralph C. Merkle. 1980. Protocols for public key cryptosystems. In 1980 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. IEEE, 122.
[45]
Ian Miers, Christina Garman, Matthew Green, and Aviel D. Rubin. 2013. Zerocoin: Anonymous distributed e-cash from Bitcoin. In 2013 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. IEEE, 397–411.
[46]
Satoshi Nakamoto. 2008. Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Decentralized Business Review (2008), 21260.
[47]
Markus Nissl, Emanuel Sallinger, Stefan Schulte, and Michael Borkowski. 2021. Towards cross-blockchain smart contracts. In 2021 IEEE International Conference on Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures (DAPPS). IEEE, 85–94.
[48]
Peter Robinson. 2021. Survey of crosschain communications protocols. Computer Networks 200 (2021), 108488.
[49]
Peter Robinson and John Brainard. 2019. Anonymous state pinning for private blockchains. In 2019 18th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications/13th IEEE International Conference on Big Data Science and Engineering (TrustCom/BigDataSE). IEEE, 827–834.
[50]
Eli Ben Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Christina Garman, Matthew Green, Ian Miers, Eran Tromer, and Madars Virza. 2014. Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from Bitcoin. In 2014 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. IEEE, 459–474.
[51]
Narges Shadab, Farzin Houshmand, and Mohsen Lesani. 2020. Cross-chain transactions. In 2020 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC). IEEE, 1–9.
[52]
Michael Sober, Giulia Scaffino, Christof Spanring, and Stefan Schulte. 2021. A voting-based blockchain interoperability oracle. In 2021 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain). IEEE, 160–169.
[53]
Ewa Syta, Iulia Tamas, Dylan Visher, David Isaac Wolinsky, Philipp Jovanovic, Linus Gasser, Nicolas Gailly, Ismail Khoffi, and Bryan Ford. 2016. Keeping authorities “honest or bust” with decentralized witness cosigning. In 2016 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP). IEEE, 526–545.
[54]
Hangyu Tian, Kaiping Xue, Xinyi Luo, Shaohua Li, Jie Xu, Jianqing Liu, Jun Zhao, and David S. L. Wei. 2021. Enabling cross-chain transactions: A decentralized cryptocurrency exchange protocol. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 16 (2021), 3928–3941.
[55]
TierNolan. 2013. Alt Chains and Atomic Transfers. (2013). Retrieved May 27, 2022 from https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=193281.0.
[56]
Marko Vukolić. 2015. The quest for scalable blockchain fabric: Proof-of-work vs. BFT replication. In International Workshop on Open Problems in Network Security. Springer, 112–125.
[57]
Gang Wang. 2021. SoK: Exploring blockchains interoperability. Cryptology ePrint Archive (2021).
[58]
Martin Westerkamp. 2019. Verifiable smart contract portability. In 2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC). IEEE, 1–9.
[59]
Martin Westerkamp and Jacob Eberhardt. 2020. zkRelay: Facilitating sidechains using zkSNARK-based chain-relays. In 2020 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW). IEEE, 378–386.
[60]
Gavin Wood et al. 2014. Ethereum: A secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger. Ethereum Project Yellow Paper 151, 2014 (2014), 1–32.
[61]
Yang Xiao, Ning Zhang, Wenjing Lou, and Y. Thomas Hou. 2020. A survey of distributed consensus protocols for blockchain networks. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 22, 2 (2020), 1432–1465.
[62]
Victor Zakhary, Divyakant Agrawal, and Amr El Abbadi. 2019. Atomic commitment across blockchains. arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.02847 (2019).
[63]
Alexei Zamyatin, Mustafa Al-Bassam, Dionysis Zindros, Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Pedro Moreno-Sanchez, Aggelos Kiayias, and William J. Knottenbelt. 2021. SoK: Communication across distributed ledgers. In International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Springer, 3–36.
[64]
Alexei Zamyatin, Dominik Harz, Joshua Lind, Panayiotis Panayiotou, Arthur Gervais, and William Knottenbelt. 2019. XCLAIM: Trustless, interoperable, cryptocurrency-backed assets. In 2019 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP). IEEE, 193–210.
[65]
Aiqing Zhang, Peiyun Zhang, Huaqun Wang, and Xiaodong Lin. 2020. Application-oriented block generation for consortium blockchain-based IoT systems with dynamic device management. IEEE Internet of Things Journal 8, 10 (2020), 7874–7888.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)A Blockchain-Based Fairness Guarantee Approach for Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Training in Computing Force NetworkMathematics10.3390/math1205071812:5(718)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2024
  • (2024)ChainSniper: A Machine Learning Approach for Auditing Cross-Chain Smart ContractsProceedings of the 2024 9th International Conference on Intelligent Information Technology10.1145/3654522.3654577(223-230)Online publication date: 23-Feb-2024
  • (2024)Reaching Consensus in the Byzantine Empire: A Comprehensive Review of BFT Consensus AlgorithmsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/363655356:5(1-41)Online publication date: 12-Jan-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice
Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice  Volume 2, Issue 2
June 2023
184 pages
EISSN:2769-6480
DOI:10.1145/3603695
Issue’s Table of Contents

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 08 June 2023
Online AM: 31 January 2023
Accepted: 25 November 2022
Revised: 18 October 2022
Received: 09 August 2022
Published in DLT Volume 2, Issue 2

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. Blockchain
  2. cross-chain technology
  3. security
  4. privacy
  5. effectiveness

Qualifiers

  • Survey

Funding Sources

  • National Natural Science Foundation of China
  • Key Research Project of Shaanxi Natural Science Foundation
  • ZheJiang Lab
  • 111 Project

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)1,538
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)62
Reflects downloads up to 16 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)A Blockchain-Based Fairness Guarantee Approach for Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Training in Computing Force NetworkMathematics10.3390/math1205071812:5(718)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2024
  • (2024)ChainSniper: A Machine Learning Approach for Auditing Cross-Chain Smart ContractsProceedings of the 2024 9th International Conference on Intelligent Information Technology10.1145/3654522.3654577(223-230)Online publication date: 23-Feb-2024
  • (2024)Reaching Consensus in the Byzantine Empire: A Comprehensive Review of BFT Consensus AlgorithmsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/363655356:5(1-41)Online publication date: 12-Jan-2024
  • (2024)ABE-Based Postquantum Cross-Blockchain Data Exchange Approach for Smart AgricultureIEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics10.1109/TII.2024.341368420:10(12083-12091)Online publication date: Oct-2024
  • (2024)Demo: Specy Network - Trusted Multichain Automation with Verifiable Specifications2024 IEEE 44th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)10.1109/ICDCS60910.2024.00134(1412-1415)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2024
  • (2024)An Empirical Study of Cross-Chain Arbitrage in Decentralized Exchanges2024 16th International Conference on COMmunication Systems & NETworkS (COMSNETS)10.1109/COMSNETS59351.2024.10426894(488-496)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2024
  • (2024)Understanding the Blockchain Interoperability Graph Based on Cryptocurrency Price Correlation2024 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain)10.1109/Blockchain62396.2024.00058(392-399)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2024
  • (2024)BlockChain I/O: Enabling Cross-Chain CommerceIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.342152712(90915-90928)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Secure cross-chain interaction solution in multi-blockchain environmentHeliyon10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e2886110:7(e28861)Online publication date: Apr-2024
  • (2024) H T 2 R E PComputer Standards & Interfaces10.1016/j.csi.2024.10383489:COnline publication date: 25-Jun-2024
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Full Access

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Full Text

View this article in Full Text.

Full Text

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media