Distributed Ledger Interoperability Security (PART 3/3)

This small series of articles documents my 5-year PhD journey in the world of blockchain interoperability.

Let us finish this series by exploring the conclusions and implications of this work and future research directions.

The thesis makes several significant contributions to the field of blockchain interoperability since:

1. It provides the first comprehensive framework for classifying, assessing, and selecting blockchain interoperability mechanisms. This enables researchers and practitioners to evaluate solutions systematically and use new abstractions to reason about specific implementations.
2. It introduces novel protocols and systems (BUNGEE, Hermes, Harmonia) that enable secure and reliable interoperability across different types of blockchain networks and for different user segments. These advancements lay the groundwork for enterprise adoption of cross-chain applications and the decentralization of IMs.
3. It develops new security techniques using zero-knowledge proofs and process mining to enhance the robustness of interoperability mechanisms against attacks, laying the ground for efficient and robust incident response mechanisms.

More systematically, here are all the contributions, organized by the research question they address:

The implications of this work are significant and non-trivial:

• We provide a systematization of the area that clears the clutter and makes this technology easier to reason about.
• We enable the development of more sophisticated cross-chain applications that can leverage the strengths of multiple networks.
• We provide a path for enterprises to integrate blockchain technology into their existing systems safely.
• We provide succinct and transparent IMs for decentralized blockchain interoperability.

Combining all the puzzle pieces of this thesis, we obtain the following diagram:

Now, while we have provided some new knowledge to the area, there is a lot of work to be done.

Future Work

Some key areas for future research include:

1. Further development of organizational and legal interoperability frameworks to enable cross-border and cross-jurisdictional blockchain applications.
2. Improving the privacy guarantees of cross-chain transactions, potentially using advanced cryptographic techniques.
3. Creating comprehensive benchmarks and testing frameworks to evaluate the performance and security of interoperability mechanisms systematically.
4. Developing more sophisticated monitoring and incident response systems to protect cross-chain applications against evolving attack vectors.
5. Exploring the implications of quantum computing on blockchain interoperability and developing quantum-resistant protocols.
6. Investigating how blockchain interoperability can enable new decentralized governance models and economic systems.
7. Cross-chain privacy models and methods
8. Security and privacy of bridge aggregators

As the blockchain ecosystem continues to evolve, interoperability will remain a critical area of research and development. The foundations laid in this thesis provide a strong basis for future innovations that can unlock the full potential of blockchain technology.

We are actually already working on some of these topics. See Benchmarking Bridge Aggregators, the first formalization and empirical evaluation of this new class of blockchain bridges. It allows us to do cool things such as calculating the shortest (i.e., cheaper) route between two tokens in any two blockchains that are swappable with one transaction only in an integrated UI, drastically improving UX (see our findings on the need for this technology here). A good example is SquidRouter,

We also started working on deploying Hephaestus in the wild with XChainWatcher (led by my friend and colleague André Augusto). In our investigations, we built cross-chain models for several bridges and found exciting things, including new undisclosed vulnerabilities and erratic user and bridge behavior. There is a lot of work ahead.

I’m also very humbled to share that I’ve been distinguished with the best PhD thesis award by my research institution, INESC-ID. I’ve recorded a video summarizing the whole research for the occasion. You may watch it here.

In conclusion, the last five years were very fulfilling. We had the chance to do state-of-the-art research on a novel, fast-moving topic. We hope our findings can help the community build the foundations for safer financial infrastructure.

I will keep specifying and building SATP because it will benefit the world. I can be reached through the contacts on my webpage.

Stay well.

That’s all, folks!

Read the other parts of this series:
Distributed Ledger Interoperability Security (PART 1/3)

Distributed Ledger Interoperability Security (PART 2/3)

Source/Thesis: Distributed Ledger Interoperability Security