Auditable Ledger Snapshot for Non-Repudiable Cross-Blockchain Communication

2025-11-20

AI Summary

Cross-blockchain transactions suffer from insufficient auditability and non-repudiation, rendering them vulnerable to malicious denial or fraudulent accountability. This paper proposes InterSnap, a secure interoperability framework leveraging cross-chain transaction receipts and on-demand distributed ledger snapshots. InterSnap innovatively binds cryptographic receipts with lightweight, dynamically generated ledger snapshots, immutably preserving evidence via decentralized storage. Snapshots are generated on demand and transmitted with low overhead, balancing security and efficiency. Evaluated on Hyperledger Fabric, the prototype demonstrates that InterSnap enables complete recovery of cross-chain credentials following adversarial attacks, supports high-concurrency workloads and cross-cloud deployments, and significantly enhances verifiability, non-repudiation, and system resilience in heterogeneous blockchain interactions.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic aspects of blockchain and cryptocurrencies
• Responsible Web: Consent frameworks and practices on the web

Abstract

Blockchain interoperability is increasingly recognized as the centerpiece for robust interactions among decentralized services. Blockchain ledgers are generally tamper-proof and thus enforce non-repudiation for transactions recorded within the same network. However, such a guarantee does not hold for cross-blockchain transactions. When disruptions occur due to malicious activities or system failures within one blockchain network, foreign networks can take advantage by denying legitimate claims or mounting fraudulent liabilities against the defenseless network. In response, this paper introduces InterSnap, a novel blockchain snapshot archival methodology, for enabling auditability of crossblockchain transactions, enforcing non-repudiation. InterSnap introduces cross-chain transaction receipts that ensure their irrefutability. Snapshots of ledger data along with these receipts are utilized as non-repudiable proof of bilateral agreements among different networks. InterSnap enhances system resilience through a distributed snapshot generation process, need-based snapshot scheduling process, and archival storage and sharing via decentralized platforms. Through a prototype implementation based on Hyperledger Fabric, we conducted experiments using on-premise machines, AWS public cloud instances, as well as a private cloud infrastructure. We establish that InterSnap can recover from malicious attacks while preserving crosschain transaction receipts. Additionally, our proposed solution demonstrates adaptability to increasing loads while securely transferring snapshot archives with minimal overhead.

Problem

• Ensuring non-repudiation for cross-blockchain transactions between different networks
• Preventing denial of legitimate claims and fraudulent liabilities across blockchains
• Providing auditable proof for bilateral agreements in cross-chain communications

Innovation

• InterSnap introduces cross-chain transaction receipts
• Distributed snapshot generation enhances system resilience
• Ledger snapshots serve as non-repudiable bilateral proof