DeCross: Toward Accountable and Efficient Cross-Chain Collaboration in IIoT

Blockchain-based industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) systems have seen rapid adoption and development in recent years. The increasing diversity of IIoT application scenarios is driving the growth of multichain ecosystem, making cross-chain communication a key issue in multichain collaboration. However, existing centralized cross-chain architectures risk derailing the blockchain's trust-free decentralization and suffer from single point failure. The design of decentralized cross-chain collaboration mainly faces two key challenges. First, implicit cross-chain accountability, which is caused by collusion among malicious distributed participants and, thus, compromises cross-chain security. Second, low cross-chain efficiency, which is induced by the highly dynamic environment in practical cross-chain networks, i.e., changing memberships, and adaptive attacks to corrupt honest nodes. In this article, we propose a cross-chain consensus protocol DeCross to solve the abovementioned problems. DeCross achieves decentralized cross-chain collaboration with explicit accountability and high efficiency. Specifically, we audit participants with a succinct auditable data object constructed from the protocol to hold nodes accountable for misbehaving. Furthermore, we propose a parallel processing workflow that leverages both CPUs and GPUs to guarantee efficient and stable cross-chain communication. Finally, we implement a prototype based on the hyperledger fabric with both local and geo-distributed clusters. Our extensive experiments show that DeCross achieves 44% better throughput over the existing cross-chain approaches.