Abstract
An important element of every blockchain network is its protocol for reaching consensus. In traditional, permissioned consensus protocols, all involved processes adhere to a global, symmetric failure model, typically only defined by bounds on the number of faulty processes. More flexible trust assumptions have recently been considered, especially in connection with blockchains. With asymmetric trust, in particular, a process is free to choose which other processes it trusts and which ones might collude against it.
Cachin and Tackmann (OPODIS 2019) introduced asymmetric quorum systems as a generalization of Byzantine quorum systems, which are the key abstraction for realizing consensus in a system with symmetric trust. This paper shows how to realize randomized signature-free asynchronous Byzantine consensus with asymmetric quorums. This results in an optimal consensus protocol with subjective, asymmetric trust and constant expected running time, which is suitable for applications in blockchain networks.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Compared to their work, we adjusted some conditions to standard terminology and chose to call the primitive “binary validated broadcast” to better emphasize its aspect of validating that a delivered value was broadcast by a correct process.
References
Benaloh, J., Leichter, J.: Generalized secret sharing and monotone functions. In: Goldwasser, S. (ed.) CRYPTO 1988. LNCS, vol. 403, pp. 27–35. Springer, New York (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-34799-2_3
Bracha, G.: Asynchronous byzantine agreement protocols. Inf. Comput. 75(2), 130–143 (1987)
Cachin, C., Guerraoui, R., Rodrigues, L.E.T.: Introduction to Reliable and Secure Distributed Programming, 2 edn. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Cachin, C., Kursawe, K., Shoup, V.: Random oracles in constantinople: practical asynchronous byzantine agreement using cryptography. J. Cryptol. 18(3), 219–246 (2005)
Cachin, C., Tackmann, B.: Asymmetric distributed trust. In: Proceedings of the OPODIS. LIPIcs, vol. 153, pp. 7:1–7:16 (2019)
Cachin, C., Zanolini, L.: From symmetric to asymmetric asynchronous byzantine consensus. e-print, arXiv:2005.08795 [cs.DC] (2020)
Canetti, R., Rabin, T.: Fast asynchronous byzantine agreement with optimal resilience. In: Proceedings of the STOC, pp. 42–51 (1993)
Crain, T., Gramoli, V., Larrea, M., Raynal, M.: DBFT: efficient leaderless byzantine consensus and its application to blockchains. In: Proceedings of the NCA, pp. 1–8 (2018)
Damgård, I., Desmedt, Y., Fitzi, M., Nielsen, J.B.: Secure protocols with asymmetric trust. In: Kurosawa, K. (ed.) ASIACRYPT 2007. LNCS, vol. 4833, pp. 357–375. Springer, Heidelberg (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-76900-2_22
García-Pérez, Á., Gotsman, A.: Federated byzantine quorum systems. In: Proceedings of the OPODIS. LIPIcs, vol. 125, pp. 17:1–17:16 (2018)
Hadzilacos, V., Toueg, S.: Fault-tolerant broadcasts and related problems. In: Mullender, S.J. (ed.) Distributed Systems (2nd ed.), pp. 97–145. ACM Press (1993)
Hirt, M., Maurer, U.M.: Player simulation and general adversary structures in perfect multiparty computation. J. Cryptol. 13(1), 31–60 (2000)
Junqueira, F.P., Marzullo, K.: Synchronous consensus for dependent process failure. In: Proceedings of the ICDCS, pp. 274–283 (2003)
Lokhava, M., et al.: Fast and secure global payments with stellar. In: Proceedings of the SOSP, pp. 80–96 (2019)
Losa, G., Gafni, E., Mazières, D.: Stellar consensus by instantiation. In: Proceedings of the DISC. LIPIcs, vol. 146, pp. 27:1–27:15 (2019)
Malkhi, D., Nayak, K., Ren, L.: Flexible byzantine fault tolerance. In: Proceedings of the ACM CCS, pp. 1041–1053 (2019)
Malkhi, D., Reiter, M.K.: Byzantine quorum systems. Distrib. Comput. 11(4), 203–213 (1998)
Mazières, D.: The Stellar consensus protocol: a federated model for Internet-level consensus. Stellar, available online (2016). https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pdf
Miller, A., Xia, Y., Croman, K., Shi, E., Song, D.: The honey badger of BFT protocols. In: Proceedings of the ACM CCS, pp. 31–42 (2016)
Mostéfaoui, A., Hamouma, M., Raynal, M.: Signature-free asynchronous byzantine consensus with t 2\(<\)n/3 and o(n\({}^{\text{2}}\)) messages. In: Proceedings of the PODC, pp. 2–9 (2014)
Mostéfaoui, A., Moumen, H., Raynal, M.: Signature-free asynchronous binary byzantine consensus with t \(<\) n/3, o(n2) messages, and O(1) expected time. J. ACM 62(4), 31:1–31:21 (2015)
Patra, A., Choudhury, A., Rangan, C.P.: Asynchronous byzantine agreement with optimal resilience. Distrib. Comput. 27(2), 111–146 (2014)
Rabin, M.O.: Randomized byzantine generals. In: Proceedings of the FOCS, pp. 403–409 (1983)
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Orestis Alpos, Vincent Gramoli, Giorgia Azzurra Marson, Achour Mostéfaoui, and anonymous reviewers for interesting discussions and helpful feedback.
This work has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) under grant agreement Nr. 200021_188443 (Advanced Consensus Protocols).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Cachin, C., Zanolini, L. (2022). Asymmetric Asynchronous Byzantine Consensus. In: Garcia-Alfaro, J., Muñoz-Tapia, J.L., Navarro-Arribas, G., Soriano, M. (eds) Data Privacy Management, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology. DPM CBT 2021 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13140. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93944-1_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93944-1_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-93943-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-93944-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)