Existing permissioned blockchain systems designate a fixed and explicit group of committee nodes to run a consensus protocol that confirms the same sequence of blocks among all nodes. Unfortunately, when such a permissioned blockchain runs in a large scale on the Internet, these explicit committee nodes can be easily turned down by denial-of-service (DoS) or network partition attacks. Although work proposes scalable BFT protocols that run on a larger number of committee nodes, their efficiency drops dramatically when only a small number of nodes are attacked. In this paper, our EGES protocol leverages Intel SGX to develop a new abstraction called "stealth committee", which effectively hides the committee nodes into a large pool of fake committee nodes. EGES selects a distinct group of stealth committee for each block and confirms the same sequence of blocks among all nodes with overwhelming probability. Evaluation on typical geo-distributed settings shows that: (1)EGES is the first permissioned blockchain's consensus protocol that can tolerate tough DoS and network partition attacks; and (2) EGES achieves comparable throughput and latency as existing permissioned blockchains' protocols
@article{arxiv.1808.02252,
title = {Efficient and DoS-resistant Consensus for Permissioned Blockchains},
author = {Xusheng Chen and Shixiong Zhao and Ji Qi and Jianyu Jiang and Haoze Song and Cheng Wang and Tsz On Li and T. -H. Hubert Chan and Fengwei Zhang and Xiapu Luo and Sen Wang and Gong Zhang and Heming Cui},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.02252},
year = {2020}
}