Automated market makers (AMMs) are a prime example of Web 3.0 applications. Their popularity and high trading activity led to serious scalability issues in terms of throughput and state size. In this paper, we address these challenges by utilizing a new sidechain architecture, building a system called ammBoost. ammBoost reduces the amount of on-chain transactions, boosts throughput, and supports blockchain pruning. We devise several techniques to enable layer 2 processing for AMMs, including a functionality-split and layer 2 traffic summarization paradigm, an epoch-based deposit mechanism, and pool snapshot-based and delayed token-payout trading. We also build a proof-of-concept for a Uniswap-inspired use case to empirically evaluate performance. Our experiments show that ammBoost decreases the gas cost by 96.05% and the chain growth by at least 93.42%, and that it can support up to 500x of the daily traffic volume of Uniswap.

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology provide an innovative model for reshaping digital services. Driven by the movement toward Web 3.0, recent systems started to provide distributed services, such as computation outsourcing or file storage, on top of the currency exchange medium. By allowing anyone to join and collect cryptocurrency payments for serving others, these systems create decentralized markets for trading digital resources. Yet, there is still a big gap between the promise of these markets and their practical viability. Existing initiatives are still early-stage and have already encountered security and efficiency obstacles. At the same time, existing work around promising ideas, specifically sidechains, fall short in exploiting their full potential in addressing these problems. To bridge this gap, we propose chainBoost, a secure performance booster for decentralized resource markets. It expedites service related operations, reduces the blockchain size, and supports flexible service-payment exchange modalities at low overhead. At its core, chainBoost employs a sidechain, that has a (security and semantic) mutual-dependence with the mainchain, to which the system offloads heavy/frequent operations. To enable it, we develop a novel sidechain architecture composed of temporary and permanent blocks, a block suppression mechanism to prune the sidechain, a syncing protocol to permit arbitrary data exchange between the two chains, and an autorecovery protocol to support robustness and resilience. We analyze the security of chainBoost, and implement a proof-of-concept prototype for a distributed file storage market as a use case. For a market handling around 2000 transactions per round, our experiments show up to 11x improvement in throughput and 94% reduction in confirmation time. They also show that chainBoost can reduce the main blockchain size by ~90%, and that it outperforms comparable optimistic rollup solutions by reducing transaction finality by 99.7%.

The software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm promises greater control and understanding of enterprise network activities, particularly for management applications that need awareness of network-wide behavior. However, the current focus on switch-based SDNs raises concerns about data-plane scalability, especially when using fine-grained flows. Further, these switch-centric approaches lack visibility into end-host and application behaviors, which are valuable when making access control decisions.In recent work, we proposed a host-based SDN in which we installed software on the end-hosts and used a centralized network control to manage the flows. This improve scalability and provided application information for use in network policy. However, that approach was not compatible with OpenFlow and had provided only conservative estimates of possible network performance.In this work, we create a high performance host-based SDN that is compatible with the OpenFlow protocol. Our approach, DeepContext, provides details about the application context to the network controller, allowing enhanced decision-making. We evaluate the performance of DeepContext, comparing it to traditional networks and Open vSwitch deployments. We further characterize the completeness of the data provided by the system and the resulting benefits.

While enterprise networks follow best practices and security measures, residential networks often lack these protections. Home networks have constrained resources and lack a dedicated IT staff that can secure and manage the network and systems. At the same time, homes must tackle the same challenges of securing heterogeneous devices when communicating to the Internet. In this work, we explore combining software-defined networking and proxies with commodity residential Internet routers. We evaluate a “whole home” proxy solution for the Skype video conferencing application to determine the viability of the approach in practice. We find that we are able to automatically detect when a device is about to use Skype and dynamically intercept all of the Skype communication and route it through a proxy while not disturbing unrelated network flows. Our approach works across multiple operating systems, form factors, and versions of Skype.