Towards Efficient Hashing in Ethereum Smart Contracts

Emanuel Onica, Cosmin-Ionuţ Schifirneţ

2021

Abstract

Ethereum is a popular public blockchain platform and currently the most significant featuring smart contract functionality. Smart contracts are small programs that are executed on the blockchain nodes, which can be used to implement complex transaction logic. Several high-level programming languages are available for writing Ethereum smart contracts, the most used being Solidity. The high-level code is further translated into a bytecode executed by a dedicated runtime environment, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). A few operations are, however, externalized as precompiled contracts, and run by the native implementation of the Ethereum node. These are typically computationally intensive operations such as cryptographic hash functions. Various smart contract patterns require hash computations. In such contexts, the current hash functions supported by Ethereum have a direct impact in both the performance and cost inflicted on the blockchain users. In this paper we investigate the available options for hashing in smart contracts, we discuss the implications regarding some patterns and we evaluate possible improvements. In particular we focus on the recent Blake family of cryptographic hash functions, which show promising performance results, but has yet limited support in the Ethereum platform.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Onica E. and Schifirneţ C. (2021). Towards Efficient Hashing in Ethereum Smart Contracts. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT, ISBN 978-989-758-523-4, pages 660-666. DOI: 10.5220/0010606606600666

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icsoft21,
author={Emanuel Onica and Cosmin-Ionuţ Schifirneţ},
title={Towards Efficient Hashing in Ethereum Smart Contracts},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT,},
year={2021},
pages={660-666},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010606606600666},
isbn={978-989-758-523-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT,
TI - Towards Efficient Hashing in Ethereum Smart Contracts
SN - 978-989-758-523-4
AU - Onica E.
AU - Schifirneţ C.
PY - 2021
SP - 660
EP - 666
DO - 10.5220/0010606606600666