Blockchain for efficient public key infrastructure and fault-tolerant distributed consensus

Publication Date

1-1-2020

Document Type

Contribution to a Book

Publication Title

Blockchain Cybersecurity, Trust and Privacy

Editor

Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Ali Dehghantanha, Reza M. Parizi

Volume

79

DOI

10.1007/978-3-030-38181-3_5

First Page

69

Last Page

97

Abstract

This chapter consists of two major works that apply blockchain technology for improving security and trust in cyber systems. First, a cloud-based public key infrastructure (PKI) utilizing blockchain technology model is described. Enhancements over past models include the use of blockchains to establish persistent access to certificate data and certificate revocation lists. By completely decoupling the certificate authority portion of a PKI and storing certificate data inside smart contracts, the proposed method yields a sizable performance boost while decreasing the attack surface. Second, we propose a dynamic runtime sharding of Tendermint, which is an in-development state machine replication algorithm that uses the blockchain model to provide Byzantine-fault tolerance. We call this variation Randition. We incorporate recent research from blockchain consensus and replicated state machine partitioning to allow Randition users to shard their blockchain, which has greatly improved write performance at a slight cost of some Byzantine fault tolerance.

Keywords

Blockchain, Blockchain partitioning, Blockchain sharding, Byzantine fault tolerance, Certificate authority, Cloud, Public key infrastructure, Smart contract, State machine replication

Department

Computer Science

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