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Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques

EUROCRYPT 2019: Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2019 pp 720–749Cite as

Consensus Through Herding

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11476))

Abstract

State Machine Replication (SMR) is an important abstraction for a set of nodes to agree on an ever-growing, linearly-ordered log of transactions. In decentralized cryptocurrency applications, we would like to design SMR protocols that (1) resist adaptive corruptions; and (2) achieve small bandwidth and small confirmation time. All past approaches towards constructing SMR fail to achieve either small confirmation time or small bandwidth under adaptive corruptions (without resorting to strong assumptions such as the erasure model or proof-of-work).

We propose a novel paradigm for reaching consensus that departs significantly from classical approaches. Our protocol is inspired by a social phenomenon called herding, where people tend to make choices considered as the social norm. In our consensus protocol, leader election and voting are coalesced into a single (randomized) process: in every round, every node tries to cast a vote for what it views as the most popular item so far: such a voting attempt is not always successful, but rather, successful with a certain probability. Importantly, the probability that the node is elected to vote for v is independent from the probability it is elected to vote for \(v' \ne v\). We will show how to realize such a distributed, randomized election process using appropriate, adaptively secure cryptographic building blocks.

We show that amazingly, not only can this new paradigm achieve consensus (e.g., on a batch of unconfirmed transactions in a cryptocurrency system), but it also allows us to derive the first SMR protocol which, even under adaptive corruptions, requires only polylogarithmically many rounds and polylogarithmically many honest messages to be multicast to confirm each batch of transactions; and importantly, we attain these guarantees under standard cryptographic assumptions.

T.-H. Hubert Chan—This research was partially done in a consultancy agreement with Thunder Research.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    If assuming subexponential security of the underlying cryptographic building blocks, \(\chi \) can be set to \(\mathsf{poly} \log \kappa \).

  2. 2.

    If communication efficiency is not a concern, we could have n broadcast instances (composed either sequentially or in parallel) where everyone is given the chance to act as the leader and suggest the next batch of transactions to confirm; we can then concatenate the outputs of these n broadcasts and treat it as the next block.

  3. 3.

    As discussed in the Supplemental Materials this assumption can be removed in a synchronous network while preserving communication efficiency.

  4. 4.

    Note that “forever honest” is in fact defined w.r.t. the protocol we are concerned with.

  5. 5.

    See the “Syntax” and “Constraints on ” paragraphs.

  6. 6.

    The state machine replication protocol above invokes many instances of batch agreement which may then invoke one or more instances of scoring agreement. Recall that each scoring agreement instance calls . For composition, calls to are tagged with an instance identifier. Here the instance identifier contains a pair: first the identifier of the batch agreement instance and then the identifier of the scoring agreement.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Hong Kong, Lung Fu Shan, Hong Kong

    T.-H. Hubert Chan

  2. Cornell and Thunder Research, New York, USA

    Rafael Pass & Elaine Shi

Authors
  1. T.-H. Hubert Chan
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  2. Rafael Pass
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  3. Elaine Shi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to T.-H. Hubert Chan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Technion, Haifa, Israel

    Yuval Ishai

  2. COSIC Group, KU Leuven, Heverlee, Belgium

    Vincent Rijmen

1 Electronic supplementary material

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Supplementary material 1 (pdf 470 KB)

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© 2019 International Association for Cryptologic Research

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Hubert Chan, TH., Pass, R., Shi, E. (2019). Consensus Through Herding. In: Ishai, Y., Rijmen, V. (eds) Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2019. EUROCRYPT 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11476. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17653-2_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17653-2_24

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-17652-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-17653-2

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