Fine-grained, secure and efficient data provenance on blockchain systems Ruan et al., VLDB'19 We haven’t covered a blockchain paper on The Morning Paper for a while, and today’s choice won the best paper award at VLDB’19. The goal here is to enable smart contracts to be written in which the contract logic depends on the ... Continue Reading

MadMax: surviving out-of-gas conditions in ethereum smart contracts Grech et al., OOPSLA'18 We’re transitioning to look at a selection of papers from the recent OOPSLA conference this week. MadMax won a distinguished paper award, and makes a nice bridge from the CCS blockchain papers we were looking at last week. Analysis and verification of smart ... Continue Reading

RapidChain: scaling blockchain via full sharding Zamani et al., CCS'18 RapidChain is a sharding-based public blockchain protocol along the lines of OmniLedger that we looked at earlier in the year. RapidChain is resilient to Byzantine faults from up to 1/3 of its participants, requires no trusted setup, and can achieve more than 7,300 tx/sec with ... Continue Reading

FairSwap: how to fairly exchange digital goods Dziembowski et al., CCS'18 (Preprint) This is a transactions paper with a twist. The transactions we’re talking about are purchases of digital assets. More specifically, the purchase of a file (document, movie, archive of a dataset, ...). The property we strongly care about is atomicity: either the seller ... Continue Reading

Hyperledger fabric: a distributed operating system for permissioned blockchains Androulaki et al., EuroSys'18 (If you don’t have ACM Digital Library access, the paper can be accessed either by following the link above directly from The Morning Paper blog site). This very well written paper outlines the design of HyperLedger Fabric and the rationales for many ... Continue Reading

ForkBase: an efficient storage engine for blockchain and forkable applications Wang et al., arXiv'18 ForkBase is a data storage system designed to support applications that need a combination of data versioning, forking, and tamper proofing. The prime example being blockchain systems, but this could also include collaborative applications such as GoogleDocs. Today for example Ethereum ... Continue Reading