Heliyon (Apr 2024)
Secure cross-chain interaction solution in multi-blockchain environment
Abstract
In the context of the increasingly diversified blockchain technology, interoperability among heterogeneous blockchains has become key to further advancing this field. Existing cross-chain technologies, while facilitating data and asset exchange between different blockchains to some extent, have exposed issues such as insufficient security, low efficiency, and inconsistent standards. Consequently, these issues give rise to significant obstacles in terms of both scalability and seamless communication among blockchains within a multi-chain framework. To address this, this paper proposes an efficient method for cross-chain interaction in a multi-chain environment. Building upon the traditional sidechain model, this method employs smart contracts and hash time-locked contracts (HTLCs) to design a cross-chain interaction scheme. This approach decentralizes the execution of locking, verifying, and unlocking stages in cross-chain transactions, effectively avoiding centralization risks associated with third-party entities in the process. It also greatly enhances the efficiency of fund transfers between the main chain and sidechains, while ensuring the security of cross-chain transactions to some extent. Additionally, this paper innovatively proposes a cross-chain data interaction strategy. Through smart contracts on the main chain, data from sidechains can be uploaded, verified, and stored on the main chain, achieving convenient and efficient cross-chain data sharing. The contribution of this paper is the development of a decentralized protocol that coordinates the execution of cross-chain interactions without the need to trust external parties, thereby reducing the risk of centralization and enhancing security. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our solution in increasing transaction security and efficiency, with significant improvements over existing models. Our experiments emphasize the system's ability to handle a variety of transaction scenarios with improved throughput and reduced latency, highlighting the practical applicability and scalability of our approach.