IvyCross: A Privacy-Preserving and Concurrency Control Framework for Blockchain Interoperability

Ming Li, Jian Weng, Jiasi Weng, Yi Li, Yongdong Wu, Dingcheng Li, Guowen Xu, and Robert Deng

IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2025

Abstract: Interoperability is a fundamental challenge for longenvisioned 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 heterogenous 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.

Cite:

@article{Li2025IAP,
  author = {Li, Ming and Weng, Jian and Weng, Jiasi and Li, Yi and Wu, Yongdong and Li, Dingcheng and Xu, Guowen and Deng, Robert},
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing},
  month = apr,
  title = {{IvyCross}: A Privacy-Preserving and Concurrency Control Framework for Blockchain Interoperability},
  year = {2025}
}