Cross-Shard Private Atomic Commit Protocol
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Solution Overview
Problem
Blockchain sharding introduces complexity in processing transactions while requiring preservation of transaction integrity and privacy, especially in cross-shard transactions where non-participating shards need to maintain confidentiality and data consistency.
Innovation Solution
A cross-shard private atomic commit system divides blockchain transactions into requests with a shared transaction identifier, processes them across multiple shards, and uses secret symmetric keys to ensure confidentiality, with a two-phase commit protocol to maintain atomicity and consistency.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If blockchain transactions are divided into multiple shards to improve scalability, then processing capacity increases, but transaction privacy and data consistency become harder to preserve
Solution Approach 1:
The blockchain network is divided into multiple independent shards that can process transactions in parallel. Each shard maintains its own state and processing logic, enabling simultaneous transaction handling across multiple partitions while preserving overall system consistency through the atomic commit protocol.
Solution Approach 2:
A coordinator shard acts as an intermediary to manage cross-shard transactions. It collects transaction requests, distributes them to relevant shards, aggregates responses, and commits the transaction atomically across all participating shards, ensuring privacy and consistency without requiring all shards to see all transaction data.
2Adaptability or versatility
If cross-shard transactions are processed to improve versatility, then system functionality increases, but complexity of maintaining confidentiality and consistency increases
Solution Approach 1:
The complex logic for maintaining confidentiality and consistency is extracted from individual shard processing and centralized in the coordinator shard. This separation allows participating shards to focus on their core transaction processing functions while the coordinator handles the intricate coordination, privacy preservation, and atomic commit logic.
Solution Approach 2:
The coordinator shard performs preliminary actions by pre-coordinating transaction details with participating shards before actual execution. This includes validating transaction requests, identifying relevant shards, and preparing the commit protocol in advance, which simplifies the actual transaction processing and reduces runtime complexity.
Data Source
AI summary
A computer-implemented system and method process a private transaction for dividing a blockchain transaction into a plurality of requests. Each of the requests have transaction data and a same transaction identifier. Each request is sent to a respective participating shard of a set of participating shards in the blockchain transaction of the blockchain. A response to the request is received from each participating shard, and each of the responses is sent to at least the participating shards except the shard the response was received from. In an atomic commit operation, a prepare transaction is created comprising information from the responses and the transaction identifier. The prepare transaction is submitted to the blockchain, and validity answers are received from the shards.