Blockchain systems often incur high inclusion latency due to validation and finality pipelines, limiting the performance of time-sensitive applications. We present Early Admission (EA), an overlay mechanism that reduces time-to-inclusion by allowing blocks from high-reputation proposers to become provisionally ledger-visible after partial validation. EA uses smart markers to record the provisional status and to support secure, auditable updates once the full validation is complete, and the final commitment remains governed by the underlying consensus. In an event-driven simulator spanning three high-throughput archetypes (Hedera-like, Redbelly-like, and Fabric-style), we find that EA can reduce mean time-to-inclusion by up to 65% under consistent resource assumptions, saturated demand, and bounded in-flight pipeline depth. To show that EA is robust against collusion attacks, we model adversarial incentives as a two-player game and show that collusion becomes economically unattractive when the EA-stage detection rate of early-admitted malicious blocks exceeds approximately 94%, which provides guidance for configuring EA thresholds and penalties.
Matthew Sharp, Laurent Njilla, Chin-Tser Huang· International Conference on...· 0 citations
Modern Log-Structured Merged-tree (LSM) based key-value stores achieve high performance through sequential writes and structured data organization, but this design implicitly exposes rich side-channel information at the storage layer. Even in the presence of encryption, adversaries can exploit observable artifacts, such as data placement regularity, update propagation, and inter-level transformations, to infer sensitive properties of the underlying workload. These leakages arise not from data content, but from the tight coupling between logical semantics and physical layout. We address this problem by introducing a lightweight, permutation-based obfuscation layer that randomizes data placement while preserving efficient query semantics. Our design leverages a four-round Feistel-based pseudo-random permutation, which provides strong PRP security by the Luby-Rackoff theorem to construct a keyed, invertible mapping without maintaining auxiliary mapping tables, while ensuring that storage-level representations are difficult to correlate with logical data semantics. Rather than applying randomization at a single stage, we embed the permutation mechanism throughout the data life-cycle. We further explore design variants that control the granularity and frequency of permutation to balance security guarantees with system overhead. We implement a C++ prototype and conduct controlled micro-benchmarks to evaluate the performance impact of the proposed mechanism. Results show that key transformation and block-level shuffling introduce less than 1% overhead in average operation latency for insertions, lookups, deletions, and compaction. We further provide a qualitative security analysis showing that the design eliminates key-order preservation and disrupts insertion-order locality in the storage layout. These findings suggest that Feistel-based shuffling is a lightweight and practical complement to existing encryption-based defenses for LSM-based systems.
Tieming Geng, Chin-Tser Huang· International Conference on...· 0 citations
Priority scheduling techniques aim to schedule tasks with higher priority and tighter deadlines to be executed before other tasks. However, traditional blockchain systems do not work well with priority scheduling due to issues regarding consensus mechanisms, throughput, and scalability. In this work, we propose three transaction scheduling schemes which employ a fee-based model to differentiate priority levels of transactions and select transactions for validation and inclusion based on criteria other than the order of arrival. The Priority-Based Scheduling scheme focuses on the priority level of individual transactions, the Contract-Based Scheduling scheme emphasizes the satisfaction of more customer contracts, whereas the Latency-Based Scheduling scheme prioritizes transactions with closer deadlines when bursts of transactions overwhelm the blockchain network. We implement prototypes of our transaction scheduling schemes in a private Algorand-inspired simulation and evaluate their performance by testing them under scenarios representing different transaction distribution ratios. The results show that the three transaction scheduling schemes outperform the baseline in which no scheduling is applied, and each scheme performs best in the transaction distribution scenario it is designed to handle.
Matthew Sharp, Chin-Tser Huang, Soamar Homsi· International Conference on...· 0 citations
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