We study the problem of efficiently disseminating authenticated blockchain information from blockchain nodes (servers) to Internet of Things (IoT) devices, through a wireless base station (BS). In existing blockchain protocols, upon generation of a new block, each IoT device receives a copy of the block header, authenticated via digital signature by one or more trusted servers. Since it relies on unicast transmissions, the required communication resources grow linearly with the number of IoT devices. We propose a more efficient scheme, in which a single copy of each block header is multicasted, together with the signatures of servers. In addition, if IoT devices tolerate a delay, we exploit the blockchain structure to amortize the authentication in time, by transmitting only a subset of signature in each block period. Finally, the BS sends redundant information, via a repetition code, to deal with the unreliable wireless channel, with the aim of decreasing the amount of feedback required from IoT devices. Our analysis shows the trade-off between timely authentication of blocks and reliability of the communication, depending on the channel quality (packet loss rate), the block interaction, and the presence of forks in the blockchain. The numerical results show the performance of the scheme, that is a viable starting point to design new blockchain lightweight protocols.
We construct new multi-signature schemes that provide new functionality. Our schemes are designed to reduce the size of the Bitcoin blockchain, but are useful in many other settings where multi-signatures are needed. All our constructions support both signature compression and public-key aggregation. Hence, to verify that a number of parties signed a common message m, the verifier only needs a short multi-signature, a short aggregation of their public keys, and the message m. We give new constructions that are derived from Schnorr signatures and from BLS signatures. Our constructions are in the plain public key model, meaning that users do not need to prove knowledge or possession of their secret key.