Hephaestus: Modelling, Analysis, and Performance Evaluation of Cross-Chain Transactions
Rafael Belchior
, Peter Somogyvari
, Jonas Pfannschmidt, André Vasconcelos , Miguel Correia
, Peter Somogyvari, Jonas Pfannschmidt, André Vasconcelos , Miguel Correia Instituto Superior Técnico INESC-ID Blockdaemon Accenture Source (PDF) https://www.techrxiv.org/articles/preprint/Hephaestus_Modelling_Analysis_and_Performance_Evaluation_of_Cross-Chain_Transactions/20718058
Code Github Repo
In this paper, we present our contribution to minimizing bridge attacks, by monitoring a cross-chain model.
In particular, we aggregate cross-chain events into cross-chain transactions, and verify if they follow a set of cross-chain rules, which then generate a model. We propose Hephaestus, the first cross-chain model generator that captures the operational complexity of cross-chain applications. Hephaestus can generate cross-chain models from local transactions in different ledgers, realizing arbitrary cross-chain use cases and allowing operators to monitor their applications.
Monitoring helps identify outliers and malicious behavior, which can enable programmatically stopping attacks, including bridge hacks. We conduct a detailed evaluation of our system, where we implement a cross-chain bridge use case. Our experimental results show that Hephaestus can process 600 cross-chain transactions in less than 5.5 seconds in an environment with two blockchains and requires sublinear storage, paving the way for more resilient bridge designs.
In particular, we aggregate cross-chain events into cross-chain transactions, and verify if they follow a set of cross-chain rules, which then generate a model. We propose Hephaestus, the first cross-chain model generator that captures the operational complexity of cross-chain applications. Hephaestus can generate cross-chain models from local transactions in different ledgers, realizing arbitrary cross-chain use cases and allowing operators to monitor their applications.
Monitoring helps identify outliers and malicious behavior, which can enable programmatically stopping attacks, including bridge hacks. We conduct a detailed evaluation of our system, where we implement a cross-chain bridge use case. Our experimental results show that Hephaestus can process 600 cross-chain transactions in less than 5.5 seconds in an environment with two blockchains and requires sublinear storage, paving the way for more resilient bridge designs.
Background and Core Concepts
Understanding core concepts around processes is important to construct a system that can analyze cctxs and thus create ccmodels. A process is a set of activities (or tasks) to fulfill a specific goal.
The techniques for creating, analyzing, and optimizing processes are called process mining techniques
Process mining has two sub-areas that help us in our endeavors: process discovery and process conformance. Process discovery aims to infer a process from an event log, that is, from a set of related entries, typically represented in a table. The entries in this table are events.
- An event is an occurrence that targets an activity and a point in time and is related to each other using a case id.
- The execution of a process produces what is called a trace, an ordered list of events with the same case id.
- An event log is a collection of traces that refer to one or more cases.
- A ccevent extends a local transaction with metadata. We consider this metadata to be a set of non-native attributes.
- A cctx cctx is a set of n ordered events E from a subset of domains. The events may follow a set of 1n rules R, the entity that logically connects events.
- Rules define conditions that must be verified to each event within a cctx; they depict the dependencies of each event on, for example, global time, local state, and third-party domain state.
- Cross-chain state.