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SoK: A Consensus Taxonomy in the Blockchain Era

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Topics in Cryptology – CT-RSA 2020 (CT-RSA 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 12006))

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Abstract

Consensus is arguably one of the most fundamental problems in distributed computing, playing also an important role in the area of cryptographic protocols as the enabler of a secure broadcast functionality. While the problem has a long and rich history and has been analyzed from many different perspectives, recently, with the advent of blockchain protocols like Bitcoin, it has experienced renewed interest from a much wider community of researchers and has seen its application expand to various novel settings.

One of the main issues in consensus research is the many different variants of the problem that exist as well as the various ways the problem behaves when different setup, computational assumptions and network models are considered. In this work we perform a systematization of knowledge in the landscape of consensus research in the Byzantine failure model starting with the original formulation in the early 1980s up to the present blockchain-based new class of consensus protocols. Our work is a roadmap for studying the consensus problem under its many guises, classifying the way it operates in the various settings and highlighting the exciting new applications that have emerged in the blockchain era.

The full version of this paper can be found in the Cryptology ePrint Archive [65].

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Refer to Sect. 6 for more efficient transformations, where in particular the longer message is only transmitted O(n) times, as opposed to \(O(n^2)\).

  2. 2.

    Note that in contrast to a sender-anonymous channel (cf. [35]), a diffuse channel will leak the identity of the sender to the adversary.

  3. 3.

    The lower bound was in fact shown by Neiger, who formulated this version of the problem [99].

  4. 4.

    In [50] partial synchrony between the clocks of the processors is also considered as a separate relaxation to the model. In the present treatment we only focus on partial synchrony with respect to message passing.

  5. 5.

    Hence, consensus in this setting shares a similar profile with consensus in the asynchronous network model [58].

  6. 6.

    Alternatively, the protocols would consider as valid any chain that extends the empty chain, and where the adversary is not allowed any pre-computation.

  7. 7.

    Note the similarity with standard consensus in the eventual-delivery setting (Sect. 6), where not all honest parties’ inputs may be accounted for.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Juan Garay

  2. University of Edinburgh and IOHK, Edinburgh, UK

    Aggelos Kiayias

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  1. Juan Garay
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  2. Aggelos Kiayias
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  1. University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

    Stanislaw Jarecki

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Garay, J., Kiayias, A. (2020). SoK: A Consensus Taxonomy in the Blockchain Era. In: Jarecki, S. (eds) Topics in Cryptology – CT-RSA 2020. CT-RSA 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12006. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40186-3_13

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