SharHSC: A Sharding-Based Hybrid State Channel to Realize Blockchain Scalability and SecurityShow others and affiliations
2025 (English)In: IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, ISSN 1545-5971, E-ISSN 1941-0018, Vol. 22, no 3, p. 2705-2722Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
Addressing blockchain's insufficient throughput and scalability is imperative for practical viability. Off-chain approaches, such as state channels (including Hash Time Lock Contract (HTLC), virtual channels), demonstrate enhanced throughput by enabling parallel transaction processing. While virtual channels introduce execution complexity, HTLC suffers from high update delays. Moreover, existing methods face network attacks. We present Sharding-based Hybrid State Channel (SharHSC) to address these issues. First, we introduce a novel off-chain sharding architecture, which partitions proxy nodes into multiple shards. Thus, when the off-chain node count increases, adding shards enhances system throughput. Second, each shard establishes a supervisory committee to record latest channel statuses to ensure accurate fund distribution upon channel closure. Third, we combine the strengths of HTLC and virtual channels. In particular, SharHSC constructs a single virtual channel across all the nodes involved in the payment by treating the nodes between payer and payee as an intermediate entity, which utilizes HTLC for fund routing. This realizes both low latency and streamlined complexity. Finally, our work is substantiated by security analysis and experiments. As the node number varies, compared with HTLC and virtual channels, the latency is reduced by 49.32% and 31.82%, and the throughput is increased by 8.93 and 1.89 times. © 2004-2012 IEEE.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Piscataway, NJ: IEEE, 2025. Vol. 22, no 3, p. 2705-2722
Keywords [en]
Blockchains, Scalability, Routing, Sharding, Throughput, Security, Complexity theory, Low latency communication, Costs, Privacy
National Category
Computer Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-55231DOI: 10.1109/TDSC.2024.3521437ISI: 001488108000002Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85213469826OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hh-55231DiVA, id: diva2:1926874
Note
Funding: The National Key R&D Program of China (2021YFB2700200), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U21B2021, U22B2008, U2241213, 62202027, 62472015, 61972018, 61932014, 62172025), Young Elite Scientists Sponsorship Program by China Association for Science and Technology (2022QNRC001), Beijing Natural Science Foundation (M23016)
2025-01-132025-01-132025-10-01Bibliographically approved