Related papers: Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget
The security of many Proof-of-Stake (PoS) payment systems relies on quorum-based State Machine Replication (SMR) protocols. While classical analyses assume purely Byzantine faults, real-world systems must tolerate both arbitrary failures…
We previously proposed a cross-referencing method for enabling multiple peer-to-peer network domains to manage their own public blockchains and periodically exchanging the state of the latest fixed block in the blockchain with hysteresis…
Our work focuses on the design of a scalable permissionless blockchain in the proof-of-stake setting. In particular, we use a distributed hash table as a building block to set up randomized shards, and then leverage the sharded architecture…
We introduce a new permissionless blockchain architecture called ABC. ABC is completely asynchronous, and does rely on neither randomness nor proof-of-work. ABC can be parallelized, and transactions have finality within one round trip of…
Gasper, the consensus protocol currently employed by Ethereum, typically requires 64 to 95 slots -- the units of time during which a new chain extending the previous one by one block is proposed and voted -- to finalize. This means that…
Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus forms the foundation of many modern blockchains striving for both high throughput and low latency. A growing bottleneck is transaction execution and validation on the critical path of consensus,…
Some of the recent blockchain proposals, such as Stellar and Ripple, allow for open membership while using quorum-like structures typical for classical Byzantine consensus with closed membership. This is achieved by constructing quorums in…
Blockchain technology enforces the security, robustness, and traceability of operations of Process-Aware Information Systems (PAISs). In particular, transparency ensures that all data is publicly available, fostering trust among…
A blockchain is a distributed ledger for recording transactions, maintained by many nodes without central authority through a distributed cryptographic protocol. All nodes validate the information to be appended to the blockchain, and a…
Consensus mechanism is the heart of any blockchain network. Many projects have proposed alternative protocols to improve restricted scalability of Proof of Work originated since Bitcoin. As an improvement of Delegated Proof of Stake, in…
In this paper we analyze from the game theory point of view Byzantine Fault Tolerant blockchains when processes exhibit rational or Byzantine behavior. Our work is the first to model the Byzantine-consensus based blockchains as a committee…
Proof of Stake (PoS) protocols rely on voting mechanisms to reach consensus on the current state. If an enhanced majority of staking nodes, also called validators, agree on a proposed block, then this block is appended to the blockchain.…
We propose a refinement to the well known, and widely used, proof-of-work scheme of zeroing a cryptographic hash. Our refinement allows multiple autonomous users to cooperate on the proof-of-work for their own transactions in order to bring…
Byzantine agreement, the underlying core of blockchain, aims to make every node in a decentralized network reach consensus. Classical Byzantine agreements unavoidably face two major problems. One is $1/3$ fault-tolerance bound, which means…
In this paper, we analyze the finality of the Filecoin network, focusing on dynamic probabilistic guarantees of tipset permanence in the canonical chain. Our approach differs from static analyses that consider only the worst-case scenario;…
The problem of Byzantine consensus has been key to designing secure distributed systems. However, it is particularly difficult, mainly due to the presence of Byzantine processes that act arbitrarily and the unknown message delays in general…
Cassandra is one of the most widely used distributed data stores these days. Cassandra supports flexible consistency guarantees over a wide-column data access model and provides almost linear scale-out performance. This enables application…
With the rapid growth of hyperconnected devices and decentralized data architectures, safeguarding Internet of Things (IoT) transactions is becoming increasingly challenging. Blockchain presents a promising solution, yet its effectiveness…
Blockchain is a type of decentralized distributed network which acts as an immutable digital ledger. Despite the absence of any central governing authority to validate the blocks in the ledger, it is considered secure and immutable due to…
We describe MaGPoS, a novel consensus mechanism which is well suited to decentralized blockchain based protocols. MaGPoS is based on a combination of the well known physics of nano-scale magnetism, and previous implementations of proof of…