International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 14 September 2022

Oana Ciobotaru, Fatemeh Shirazi, Alistair Stewart, Sergey Vasilyev
ePrint Report ePrint Report
A major challenge for blockchain interoperability is having an on-chain light client protocol that is both efficient and secure. We present a protocol that provides short proofs about the state of a decentralised consensus protocol while being able to detect misbehaving parties. To do this naively, a verifier would need to maintain an updated list of all participants' public keys which makes the corresponding proofs long. In general, existing solutions either lack accountability or are not efficient. We define and design a committee key scheme with short proofs that do not include any of the individual participants' public keys in plain. Our committee key scheme, in turn, uses a custom designed SNARK which has a fast prover time. Moreover, using our committee key scheme, we define and design an accountable light client system as the main cryptographic core for building bridges between proof of stake blockchains. Finally, we implement a prototype of our custom SNARK for which we provide benchmarks.
Expand

Additional news items may be found on the IACR news page.