ABSTRACT
Many recent research works have proposed distributed ledger technology (DLT) that employs Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols as the underlying core primitive to create a total order among all transactions. Compared to many Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains, this design typically benefits from increased performance, energy efficiency and proven liveness and safety characteristics. While BFT protocols have the potential to create highly resilient infrastructures, some questions yet remain to be answered. This paper sketches our current and future research on how DLTs can benefit from making the underlying BFT protocol adaptive towards the system's environment (e.g., geographic decentralization or system scale) and resilient against attacks of malicious replicas that are targeted at degrading the overall system performance.
- Yair Amir, Brian Coan, Jonathan Kirsch, and John Lane. 2011. Prime: Byzantine replication under attack. IEEE Trans. on Dependable and Secure Comp. 8, 4 (2011), 564--577. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Elli Androulaki et al. 2018. Hyperledger Fabric: a distributed operating system for permissioned blockchains. In Proc. of the 13th EuroSys Conf. ACM, 30. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Christian Berger and Hans P. Reiser. 2018. Scaling Byzantine Consensus: A Broad Analysis. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Scalable and Resilient Infrastructures for Distributed Ledgers (SERIAL). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Christian Berger, Hans P Reiser, João Sousa, and Alysson Bessani. 2019. Resilient Wide-Area Byzantine Consensus Using Adaptive Weighted Replication. In Proceedings of the 38th IEEE International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS).Google ScholarCross Ref
- Christian Berger, Hans P. Reiser, João Sousa, and Alysson Bessani. 2020. AWARE: Adaptive Wide-Area Replication for Fast and Resilient Byzantine Consensus. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing [to be published]. https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2020.3030605Google Scholar
- Alysson Bessani, João Sousa, and Eduardo EP Alchieri. 2014. State machine replication for the masses with BFT-SMaRt. In 44th Annu. IEEE/IFIP Int. Conf. on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 2014. 355--362. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Miguel Castro and Barbara Liskov. 1999. Practical Byzantine fault tolerance. In Proceedings of the Third Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation. 173--186. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kevin Driscoll, Brendan Hall, Michael Paulitsch, Phil Zumsteg, and Hakan Sivencrona. 2004. The real byzantine generals. In The 23rd Digital Avionics Systems Conference (IEEE Cat. No. 04CH37576), Vol. 2. IEEE, 6-D.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Yossi Gilad, Rotem Hemo, Silvio Micali, Georgios Vlachos, and Nickolai Zeldovich. 2017. Algorand: Scaling Byzantine agreements for cryptocurrencies. In Proceedings of the 26th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. ACM, 51--68. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias, Philipp Jovanovic, Nicolas Gailly, Ismail Khoffi, Linus Gasser, and Bryan Ford. 2016. Enhancing bitcoin security and performance with strong consistency via collective signing. In 25th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 16). 279--296. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Philipp Jovanovic, Linus Gasser, Nicolas Gailly, Ewa Syta, and Bryan Ford. 2018. OmniLedger: A Secure, Scale-Out, Decentralized Ledger via Sharding. In 2018 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP). 583--598.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, and Marshall Pease. 1982. The Byzantine Generals Problem. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 4, 3 (July 1982), 382--401. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Peilun Li, Guosai Wang, Xiaoqi Chen, Fan Long, and Wei Xu. 2020. Gosig: A Scalable and High-Performance Byzantine Consensus for Consortium Blockchains (SoCC '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 223--237. https://doi.org/10.1145/3419111.3421272 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jian Liu, Wenting Li, G Karame, and N Asokan. 2018. Scalable Byzantine Consensus via Hardware-assisted Secret Sharing. IEEE Trans. Comput. (2018).Google Scholar
- Giuliano Losa, Eli Gafni, and David Mazières. 2019. Stellar Consensus by Instantiation. In 33rd International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2019). Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik.Google Scholar
- Andrew Miller, Yu Xia, Kyle Croman, Elaine Shi, and Dawn Song. 2016. The honey badger of BFT protocols. In Proc. of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. ACM, 31--42. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Satoshi Nakamoto. 2008. Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. [Online]. Available: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf (last Accessed: 22/09/2020).Google Scholar
- Fred B Schneider. 1990. Implementing fault-tolerant services using the state machine approach: A tutorial. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) 22, 4 (1990), 299--319. Google ScholarDigital Library
- João Sousa and Alysson Bessani. 2015. Separating the WHEAT from the Chaff: An Empirical Design for Geo-Replicated State Machines. In 34th IEEE Symp. on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS). IEEE, 146--155. Google ScholarDigital Library
- João Sousa, Alysson Bessani, and Marko Vukolić. 2018. A Byzantine fault-tolerant ordering service for the hyperledger fabric blockchain platform. In 48th Annu. IEEE/IFIP Int. Conf. on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN). IEEE, 51--58.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Marko Vukolić. 2015. The quest for scalable blockchain fabric: Proof-of-work vs. BFT replication. In International Workshop on Open Problems in Network Security. Springer, 112--125.Google Scholar
- Maofan Yin, Dahlia Malkhi, Michael K. Reiter, Guy Golan Gueta, and Ittai Abraham. 2019. HotStuff: BFT Consensus with Linearity and Responsiveness. In Proc. of the 2019 ACM Symp. on Principles of Distributed Computing (Toronto ON, Canada) (PODC '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 347--356. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Towards Environmental-Adaptive and Performance-Resilient Consensus in Distributed Ledger Technology
Recommendations
Scaling Byzantine Consensus: A Broad Analysis
SERIAL'18: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Scalable and Resilient Infrastructures for Distributed LedgersBlockchains and distributed ledger technology (DLT) that rely on Proof-of-Work (PoW) typically show limited performance. Several recent approaches incorporate Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols in their DLT design as Byzantine consensus ...
Fast and adaptive BFT state machine replication
Middleware '22 Doctoral Symposium: Proceedings of the 23rd International Middleware Conference Doctoral SymposiumRecently, Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) state machine replication (SMR) experiences renewed research interest with the rise of novel BFT SMR-based distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). In DLTs, BFT SMR is used as a core primitive for maintaining a ...
The Quest for Scalable Blockchain Fabric: Proof-of-Work vs. BFT Replication
Open Problems in Network SecurityAbstractBitcoin cryptocurrency demonstrated the utility of global consensus across thousands of nodes, changing the world of digital transactions forever. In the early days of Bitcoin, the performance of its probabilistic proof-of-work (PoW) based ...
Comments