Related papers: GRANDPA: a Byzantine Finality Gadget
Nakamoto's consensus protocol works in a permissionless model and tolerates Byzantine failures, but only offers probabilistic agreement. Recently, the Sandglass protocol has shown such weaker guarantees are not a necessary consequence of a…
Low latency is one of the most desirable features of partially synchronous Byzantine consensus protocols. Existing low-latency protocols have achieved consensus with just two communication steps by reducing the maximum number of faults the…
In a practical Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) blockchain network, the voting nodes may always leave the network while some new nodes can also enter the network, thus the number of voting nodes is constantly changing. Such a new PBFT with…
Synchronous consensus protocols offer a significant advantage over their asynchronous and partially synchronous counterparts by providing higher fault tolerance -- an essential benefit in distributed systems, like blockchains, where…
Consensus is a fundamental building block for constructing reliable and fault-tolerant distributed services. Many Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols designed for partially synchronous systems adopt a pessimistic approach when…
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…
The practical Byzantine fault tolerant (PBFT) consensus mechanism is one of the most basic consensus algorithms (or protocols) in blockchain technologies, thus its performance evaluation is an interesting and challenging topic due to a…
With the rapid development of blockchain, Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols have attracted revived interest recently. To overcome the theoretical bounds of Byzantine fault tolerance, many protocols attempt to use Trusted Execution…
Existing Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) protocols face significant challenges in the consortium blockchain scenario. On the one hand, we can make little assumptions about the reliability and security of the underlying Internet. On the…
First-generation blockchains provide probabilistic finality: a block can be revoked, albeit the probability decreases as the block sinks deeper into the chain. Recent proposals revisited committee-based BFT consensus to provide…
Recently, the blockchain technique was put in the spotlight as it introduced a systematic approach for multiple parties to reach consensus without needing trust. However, the application of this technique in practice is severely restricted…
This paper introduces Flexible BFT, a new approach for BFT consensus solution design revolving around two pillars, stronger resilience and diversity. The first pillar, stronger resilience, involves a new fault model called alive-but-corrupt…
The CAP theorem says that no blockchain can be live under dynamic participation and safe under temporary network partitions. To resolve this availability-finality dilemma, we formulate a new class of flexible consensus protocols,…
In recent years, Byzantine Agreement is being considered in increasing scales due to the proliferation of blockchains and other decentralized financial technologies. Consequently, a number of works have improved its communication complexity…
The availability-finality dilemma says that blockchain protocols cannot be both available under dynamic participation and safe under network partition. Snap-and-chat protocols have recently been proposed as a resolution to this dilemma. A…
Achieving low-latency consensus in geographically distributed systems remains a key challenge for blockchain and distributed database applications. To this end, there has been significant recent interest in State-Machine-Replication (SMR)…
This article will take you on a journey to the core of blockchains, their Byzantine consensus engine, where HotStuff emerged as a new algorithmic foundation for the classical Byzantine generals consensus problem. The first part of the…
It has been known since the early 1980s that Byzantine Agreement in the full information, asynchronous model is impossible to solve deterministically against even one crash fault [FLP85], but that it can be solved with probability 1…
With the advancement of blockchain systems, many recent research works have proposed distributed ledger technology~(DLT) that employs Byzantine fault-tolerant~(BFT) consensus protocols to decide which block to append next to the ledger.…
Trust is the basis of any distributed, fault-tolerant, or secure system. A trust assumption specifies the failures that a system, such as a blockchain network, can tolerate and determines the conditions under which it operates correctly. In…