A Dynamic Sharding Model Aware Security and Scalability in Blockchain

Security and scalability are considered as two major challenges in rapid and smooth deployment of blockchains in businesses, enterprises and organizations. Common belief is that the ability to scale up a blockchain lies mainly in improving the underlying technology rather than deploying new hardware. Though recent research works have applied sharding techniques in enhancing scalability of blockchains, they do not cater for addressing the joint issue of data security and scalability in blockchains. This paper proposes an approach that makes a trade-off between security and scalability when designing blockchain based systems. It designs an efficient replication model, which creates dynamic sharding wherein blocks are stored in a varying number of nodes. In order to maintain required level of security, the proposed approach shows that the replication of blockchain over peer-to-peer network is minimized as the blockchain’s length evolves according to a replication factor.