Towards random-honest miners selection and multi-blocks creation: Proof-of-negotiation consensus mechanism in blockchain networks

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2019.11.026Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Propose a consensus mechanism to select random-honest miners in blockchian networks.

  • Design two methods to implement parallel multi-blocks creation.

  • Construct a distributed manner to store massive blocks with map function.

Abstract

As one of the fundamental characteristics of blockchain networks, consensus mechanism has attracted tremendous interests from both the academics and industries. Recently, more attention has been paid to the consensus mechanism with fair multi-miners participation. However, most of them are fixed-miners based and one-by-one block creation, and thus offering opportunities for attackers to launch DoS attack against the fixed miners or manipulate the blocks creation by bribing the fixed miners. Additionally, one-by-one block creation may result in vast transactions waiting to be confirmed, especially in a large scale of blockchain network. In this paper, we propose a novel consensus mechanism called proof-of-negotiation (PoN). With negotiation rules, trust management is introduced to evaluate the trustworthiness of miners, and thus achieving the random-honest miners selection for a round of block creation. To further improve the efficiency of PoN in creating blocks, parallel multi-blocks creation can be implemented synchronously or asynchronously by dividing the miner team as k groups. Meanwhile, a distributed blocks storage scheme is designed with a map function to alleviate the storage volume caused by massive blocks creation. Simulation results show that PoN is more effective than traditional consensus mechanism in one-by-one block creation and more efficient in creating blocks.

Introduction

Blockchain initially gained traction in 2008 as the technology underlying Bitcoin [1], but now has been employed in a diverse range of applications and created a global market worth. The reasoning behind this is the transparency, security, quality assurance, global peer-to-peer transactions, and decentralization that blockchain technology provides [2]. By means of data encryption, time stamps, consensus mechanism and smart contract, blockchain can implement decentralized credit point-to-point transaction, coordination and cooperation in a distributed system, so as to provide solutions for the high cost, low efficiency and data storage insecurity of centralized institutions.

Blockchain could be regarded as a public ledger, in which all committed transactions are stored in a chain of blocks [3]. This chain continuously grows in chronological order when new blocks are appended to it. The core advantages of blockchain are decentralization, transparency, traceability, and tamper-resistant. So, blockchain has been applied to many fields, including financial services [4], internet of things (IoT) [5], software engineering [6], e-government and public services [7], and so on.

One of the most fundamental characteristics of blockchain networks is consensus mechanism. In blockchain networks, the blocks are validated, shared, synchronized and created across nodes via a peer-to-peer, distributed, and decentralized consensus mechanism [8]. The nodes responsible for creating blocks in consensus mechanism are called miners. Many efforts have been made to various consensus mechanism studies [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], in which the attention has began to develop the consensus mechanism with fair multi-miners participation. However, most of them select miners as fixed. This may open the door for some threats. For instance, attackers can launch DoS attack against the fixed miners, preventing them from validating new blocks or receiving messages from each other. It is also possible for attackers to manipulate the blocks creation by bribing the fixed miners. Moreover, blocks are still created one-by-one in current consensus mechanism. That is, after completing a block creation, miners just start to create a new block. If one-by-one, there are many blocks waiting to be created as transactions grow. Especially in a large scale of blockchain network, the number of nodes will get more and more, and thus resulting in vast transactions waiting to be confirmed. The efficiency of consensus mechanism will become very low.

In this paper, we propose a novel consensus mechanism called proof-of-negotiation (PoN), along with a proof-of-conceptblockchain design using fair multi-miners participation. The main contributions of this paper are as following:

  • Propose a basic consensus mechanism to select random-honest miners. Under the guidance of proof-of-negotiation, we find five negotiation rules are very helpful to achieve a fast and efficient consensus mechanism in blockchain networks. With these negotiation rules, trust management can be introduced to evaluate the trustworthiness of miners in blockchain networks. In this basis, a trusted random selection algorithm is designed to randomly select honest miners in a round of block creation from the miner team (Φ) who are composed of the majority of nodes in the network. The miner team update algorithm is also proposed to continuously perfect the members in Φ. With the two algorithms, our consensus mechanism can select honest miners and avoid miners as fixed.

  • Design two methods to implement parallel multi-blocks creation by dividing the miner team as k groups. In the synchronous creation method, miner groups can create the current k rounds of blocks synchronously, and then shift to the next k rounds of blocks together. In the asynchronous creation method, each miner group completes a block creation respectively in the current k rounds of blocks, and then begins to create a new block asynchronously in the next k rounds of blocks. One of the two methods can be chosen to achieve multi-blocks creation, which is much faster than the consensus mechanisms with one-by-one block creation. We also design the miner leaders selection and update algorithm to randomly select the most honest miners as the miner leaders who take charge of chaining multi-blocks sequentially to the blockchain by their timestamp.

  • Store massive blocks in a distributed manner when they are created by PoN. We construct a map function to locate multiple block mangers for a block. Only when a node becomes the block manger of a block can the node store the block. Without holding the IDs of block managers, the map function can rapidly locate the different block managers of a block by introducing the block list, in which each node can master the update information of the whole blockchain and maintain the chronological structure of blockchain. Compared with the traditional method that each node usually stores all blocks of the whole blockchain, our distributed manner can reduce the storage burden of each node in the face of massive blocks.

The organization of this paper is as follows: In Section 2, some background concepts and the closest related work comments are described. A basic consensus mechanism is proposed under the guidance of proof-of-negotiation in Section 3. Parallel multi-blocks creation methods are designed in Section 4. A distributed blocks storage scheme is designed in Section 5. Simulation analysis of PoN is given in Section 6. We also discuss the potential issues and future work of our consensus mechanism in Section 7. Finally, we conclude the paper in Section 8.

Section snippets

Background and related work

According to the genesis definition of blockchain [1], the steps to create blocks in the network can be described as follows:

(1) New transactions are broadcast to all nodes.

(2) Each node collects new transactions into a block.

(3) Each node works on consensus mechanism.

(4) When a node is selected to create the block by consensus mechanism, it broadcasts the block to all nodes.

(5) Nodes accept the block only if all transactions in it are valid and not already spent.

(6) Nodes express their

Basic consensus mechanism with proof-of-negotiation

To select random-honest miners, we propose a basic consensus mechanism under the guidance of proof-of-negotiation. This basic consensus mechanism can be used to create one-by-one block and support multi-blocks creation.

Parallel multi-blocks creation

To implement multi-blocks creation, the miner team can be further divided into k groups. For the ith miner group, it can be denoted as MGi (1ik). In the miner groups, each MGi can create one block. Then, k rounds of blocks can be created by k miner groups with parallel multi-blocks creation, whose architectural view is shown in Fig. 2.

For each MGi, miners are also composed of proposers and validators. When a block is accepted in MGi, the validators of MGi will also send the accepted blocks

Distributed blocks storage

With the increasing volume of transactions, multi-block creation will result in more and more blocks requiring storage. How to store blocks in a distributed manner has become a very important issue in blockchain networks.

Currently, blocks can be stored with two methods, including lightweight node storage and full node storage [14]. A lightweight node (e.g., wallets) only keeps the header of each block, including previous hash, time stamp, nonce, Merkle root. A full node stores a complete and

Simulation setup

We validate the effectiveness of our proposed PoN consensus mechanism in Python 3.6. The simulation elements are shown in Table 1.

We simulate the peer-to-peer consensus processes of ablockchain network and perform five simulations to evaluate the performance of our proposed PoN consensus mechanism. To analyze the accuracy, network overload and efficiency of PoN in terms of one-by-one block creation, we compare PoN with Tendermint and PoR. All the three typical kinds of consensus mechanism are

Discussion and future work

This paper focused on the consensus mechanism for random-honest miners selection, parallel multi-blocks creation, and distributed blocks storage. Compared with the related work, our PoN consensus mechanism can improve the fair multi-miners participation and make the random miners controllable. Moreover, the parallel multi-blocks creation can further improve the efficiency of PoN more significantly than the one-by-one block creation. To support the distributed blocks storage, our designed map

Conclusions

In this paper, we propose our PoN consensus mechanism in blockchain networks. The main contributions of PoN are three parts, including random-honest miners selection, parallel multi-blocks creation and distributed blocks storage. Aiming at random-honest miners selection, trust management is introduced to evaluate the trustworthiness of miners with negotiation rules. To implement the parallel multi-blocks creation, two methods are designed to create blocks synchronously or asynchronously by

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Jingyu Feng received his B.S. degree from Lanzhou University of Technology, China, in 2006. He received his Ph.D. degree from Xidian University, China, in 2011. He is currently a vice professor in Xi’an University of Post and Telecommunication, China. His main research interests include wireless security, trust management and blockchain.

References (30)

  • ReynaA. et al.

    On blockchain and its integration with iot. challenges and opportunities

    Future Gener. Comput. Syst.

    (2018)
  • YanZ. et al.

    A survey on trust management for internet of things

    J. Netw. Comput. Appl.

    (2014)
  • NakamotoS.

    Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system

    (2019)
  • PilkingtonM.

    Blockchain technology: principles and applications

    Res. Handb. Digit. Transf.

    (2016)
  • ZhangZ.B. et al.

    Blockchain challenges and opportunities: a survey

    Int. J. Web Grid Serv.

    (2018)
  • PetersG.W. et al.

    Trends in crypto-currencies and blockchain technologies: A monetary theory and regulation perspective

    J. Financ. Perspect.

    (2015)
  • X. Xu, C. Pautasso, L. Zhu, et al. The blockchain as a software connector, in: Proc. the 13th Working IEEE/IFIP...
  • H. Hou, The application of blockchain technology in E-government in China, in: Proc. the 26th IEEE International...
  • MackeyT.K. et al.

    A review of existing and emerging digital technologies to combat the global trade in fake medicines

    Expert Opin. Drug Saf.

    (2017)
  • Proof-of-stake

    (2019)
  • AndrewP.

    What is burstcoin?

    (2019)
  • CastroM. et al.

    Practical byzantine fault tolerance and proactive recovery

    ACM Trans. Comput. Syst.

    (2002)
  • BuchmanE.

    Tendermint: Byzantine Fault Tolerance in the Age of Blockchains

    (2016)
  • N. Alzahrani, N. Bulusu, Towards true decentralization: A blockchain consensus protocol based on game theory and...
  • WangW.B. et al.

    A survey on consensus mechanisms and mining strategy management in blockchain networks

    IEEE Access

    (2019)
  • Cited by (0)

    Jingyu Feng received his B.S. degree from Lanzhou University of Technology, China, in 2006. He received his Ph.D. degree from Xidian University, China, in 2011. He is currently a vice professor in Xi’an University of Post and Telecommunication, China. His main research interests include wireless security, trust management and blockchain.

    Xinyu Zhao received his B.S.degree from Xi’an University of Posts and Telecommunications, China, in 2016. He is currently a postgraduate Student in Xi’an University of Posts and Telecommunications. His main research interests include trust management and blockchain.

    Kexuan Chen is currently a undergraduate student in Xi’an University of Posts and Telecommunications. His main research interests include trust management and blockchain.

    Feng Zhao received his M.S. degree from Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology, China, in 2005. He is currently a senior lecturer in Xi’an University of Posts and Telecommunications, China. His main research interests include wireless security, trust management and blockchain.

    Guanghua Zhang received his B.S. degree from Heibei Normal University, China, in 2002. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degree from Xidian University, China, in 2005 and 2014 respectively. He is currently a vice professor in College of Information Science and Engineering, Hebei University of Science and Technology, China. His main research interests include wireless security, trust management and blockchain.

    This research was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U1836210, 61572460), the National Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province (2019JM-442), the University Scientific Research Foundation of Hebei Province of China (ZD2018236).

    View full text