Aurora-Trinity: A Super-Light Client for Distributed Ledger Networks Extending the Ethereum Trinity Client

Abstract

Light clients for distributed ledger networks can verify blockchain integrity by downloading and analyzing blockchain headers. They are designed to circumvent the high resource requirements, i.e., the large bandwidth and memory requirements that full nodes must meet, which are unsuitable for consumer-grade hardware and resource-constrained devices. Light clients rely on full nodes and trust them implicitly. This leaves them vulnerable to various types of attacks, ranging from accepting maliciously forged data to Eclipse attacks. We introduce Aurora-Trinity, a novel version of light clients that addresses the above-mentioned vulnerability by relying on our original Aurora module, which extends the Ethereum Trinity client. The Aurora module efficiently discovers the presence of malicious or Byzantine nodes in distributed ledger networks with a predefined and acceptable error rate and identifies at least one honest node for persistent or ephemeral communication. The identified honest node is used to detect the latest canonical chain head or to infer the state of an entry in the ledger without downloading the header chain, making the Aurora-Trinity client extremely efficient. It can run on consumer-grade hardware and resource-constrained devices, as the Aurora module consumes about 0.31 MB of RAM and 1 MB of storage at runtime.

ISTVP: Independent single transaction verification protocol for light node using fraud proofs without collaborator

“…Since this scheme does not provide validation of transaction validity, the security is more dependent on the full node. Aurora‐Trinity [12] cooperation with Aurora algorithm [19], it is able to check whether the neighbors are malicious nodes and communicate with honest nodes. Eventually, the light nodes enter into a secure distributed network environment.…”

“…To enhance the security of light nodes and mitigate attacks, various approaches have been proposed, such as Fraud Proof [17,18], Super-light clients [11,12,13], block-specific secure light node schemes [9,10], and block compression schemes [14,15,16]. Among them, Fraud Proof plays a pivotal role in securing transactions.…”