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A privacy-preserving and efficient byzantine consensus through multi-signature with ring

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Abstract

The consortium blockchain has three challenges in terms of performance, security, and privacy when adopting the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) protocol. The throughput and scalability of consortium blockchain are focused on meanwhile the privacy protection can hardly be ignored. This work proposes a privacy-preserving multi-signature and hierarchical Byzantine consensus protocol. Specifically, the signature combines a ring signature and a Schnorr one to provide three levels of privacy protection. The consensus protocol layers the network nodes into different clusters, which overcomes the shortcomings of PBFT and Schnorr signature. The theoretical analysis proves the security and privacy of the protocol and expounds the application scenarios, and the efficiency evaluation shows that the signature verification speed is 6.28 times faster than the Schnorr scheme, and the consensus in a 250-nodes network is 51.3% faster than the Schnorr-based PBFT consensus.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by Open project of Sichuan Provincial Key Laboratory of Intelligent Terminal Co built by Province and City (SCITLAB-1014), and in part by Sichuan Science and Technology Program (2021YFG0305).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China

    Xiaohua Wu, Hongji Ling, Huan Liu & Fangjian Yu

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  1. Xiaohua Wu
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  2. Hongji Ling
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Correspondence to Xiaohua Wu or Hongji Ling.

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Wu, X., Ling, H., Liu, H. et al. A privacy-preserving and efficient byzantine consensus through multi-signature with ring. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 15, 1669–1684 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-022-01317-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-022-01317-4

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