Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
10-2025
Abstract
Interoperability is a fundamental challenge for long-envisioned blockchain applications. A mainstream approach is using Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to support interoperable off-chain execution. However, this incurs multiple TEE configured with non-trivial storage capabilities running on fragile concurrent processing environments, rendering current strategies based on TEE far from being practical. This paper aims to fill this gap and design a practical interoperability mechanism with simplified TEE as the underlying architecture. Specifically, we present IvyCross, a TEE-based framework that achieves low-cost, privacy-preserving, and race-free blockchain interoperability. IvyCross allows running arbitrary smart contracts across heterogeneous blockchains atop two distributed TEE-powered hosts. We design an incentive scheme based on smart contracts to stimulate the honest behavior of two hosts, bypassing the requirement of the number of TEE and large memory need. We examine the conditions to guarantee the uniqueness of Nash Equilibrium via Game Theory. Furthermore, an extended optimistic concurrency control protocol is designed to ensure the correctness of concurrent contracts execution. We formally prove the security of IvyCross in the Universal Composability (UC) framework and implement a prototype atop Bitcoin, Ethereum, and FISCO BOCS. Extensive experimental results on end-to-end performance and concurrency control demonstrate the efficiency and practicality of IvyCross.
Keywords
Blockchain interoperability, privacy, smart contracts, trusted execution environment (TEE)
Discipline
Information Security
Research Areas
Cybersecurity
Publication
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
Volume
24
Issue
10
First Page
9334
Last Page
9351
ISSN
1536-1233
Identifier
10.1109/TMC.2025.3562875
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Citation
LI, Ming; WENG, Jian; WENG, Jia-Si; LI, Yi; WU, Yongdong; LI, Dingcheng; XU, Guowen; and DENG, Robert H..
IvyCross: A privacy-preserving and concurrency control framework for blockchain interoperability. (2025). IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. 24, (10), 9334-9351.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/10923
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2025.3562875