Surveillant: a supervision mechanism between blockchains for efficient cross-chain verification

Blockchain interoperability, which refers in particular to the ability to access information across blockchain systems, plays the key role for different blockchains to communicate with each other, and further supports the superstructure built on top of the cross-chain mechanism. Nowadays, blockchain interoperability technology is still in its infancy. The existing crosschain scheme such as BTCRelay requires that the smart contract in a blockchain to download and maintain block headers of the other blockchain, which is costly in maintenance and inefficient to use. In this paper, we propose a supervision mechanism between blockchains, called Surveillant. Specially, the new entities called dual-functional nodes are introduced to commit the real-time information from the blockchain under supervision to the supervising blockchain, which enables users to have efficient cross-chain verification. Furthermore, we introduce Merkle mountain range for blocks aggregation to deal with the large-scale committing data. We propose the design of long orphan branch counter to trace the bifurcations in the blockchain under supervision. The existing incentive mechanism is improved to encourage the behaviors of dual-functional nodes. In Surveillant, the analysis and experimental results demonstrate that users are able to have efficient cross-chain verification with low maintenance overhead.