Biblio

Bitcoin was the first successful decentralized cryptocurrency and remains the most popular of its kind to this day. Despite the benefits of its blockchain, Bitcoin still faces serious scalability issues, most importantly its ever-increasing blockchain size. While alternative designs introduced schemes to periodically create snapshots and thereafter prune older blocks, already-deployed systems such as Bitcoin are often considered incapable of adopting corresponding approaches. In this work, we revise this popular belief and present CoinPrune, a snapshot-based pruning scheme that is fully compatible with Bitcoin. CoinPrune can be deployed through an opt-in velvet fork, i.e., without impeding the established Bitcoin network. By requiring miners to publicly announce and jointly reaffirm recent snapshots on the blockchain, CoinPrune establishes trust into the snapshots' correctness even in the presence of powerful adversaries. Our evaluation shows that CoinPrune reduces the storage requirements of Bitcoin already by two orders of magnitude today, with further relative savings as the blockchain grows. In our experiments, nodes only have to fetch and process 5GiB instead of 230GiB of data when joining the network, reducing the synchronization time on powerful devices from currently 5h to 46min, with even more savings for less powerful devices.

IP technology for resource-constrained devices enables transparent end-to-end connections between a vast variety of devices and services in the Internet of Things (IoT). To protect these connections, several variants of traditional IP security protocols have recently been proposed for standardization, most notably the DTLS protocol. In this paper, we identify significant resource requirements for the DTLS handshake when employing public-key cryptography for peer authentication and key agreement purposes. These overheads particularly hamper secure communication for memory-constrained devices. To alleviate these limitations, we propose a delegation architecture that offloads the expensive DTLS connection establishment to a delegation server. By handing over the established security context to the constrained device, our delegation architecture significantly reduces the resource requirements of DTLS-protected communication for constrained devices. Additionally, our delegation architecture naturally provides authorization functionality when leveraging the central role of the delegation server in the initial connection establishment. Hence, in this paper, we present a comprehensive, yet compact solution for authentication, authorization, and secure data transmission in the IP-based IoT. The evaluation results show that compared to a public-key-based DTLS handshake our delegation architecture reduces the memory overhead by 64 %, computations by 97 %, network transmissions by 68 %.