Related papers: Dissecting the Performance of Chained-BFT
The decentralized cryptocurrency Bitcoin has experienced great success but also encountered many challenges. One of the challenges has been the long confirmation time. Another challenge is the lack of incentives at certain steps of the…
Consensus protocols have traditionally been studied in a setting where all participants are known to each other from the start of the protocol execution. In the parlance of the 'blockchain' literature, this is referred to as the…
The blockchain technology has achieved tremendous success in open (permissionless) decentralized consensus by employing proof-of-work (PoW) or its variants, whereby unauthorized nodes cannot gain disproportionate impact on consensus beyond…
Modern chained Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) systems leverage a combination of pipelining and leader rotation to obtain both efficiency and fairness. These protocols, however, require a sequence of three or four consecutive honest leaders…
Threshold guards are a basic primitive of many fault-tolerant algorithms that solve classical problems in distributed computing, such as reliable broadcast, two-phase commit, and consensus. Moreover, threshold guards can be found in recent…
This paper introduces Hamster, a novel synchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance protocol that achieves better performance and has weaker dependency on synchrony. Specifically, Hamster employs coding techniques to significantly decrease…
We introduce an information-theoretic framework, named Coded State Machine (CSM), to securely and efficiently execute multiple state machines on untrusted network nodes, some of which are Byzantine. The standard method of solving this…
Blockchains use peer-to-peer networks for disseminating information among peers, but these networks currently do not have any provable guarantees for desirable properties such as Byzantine fault tolerance, good connectivity and small…
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…
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…
Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), when managed by a few trusted validators, require most but not all of the machinery available in public DLTs. In this work, we explore one possible way to profit from this state of affairs. We devise…
This paper proposes a Byzantine-resilient consensus-based distributed filter (BR-CDF) wherein network agents employ partial sharing of state parameters. We characterize the performance and convergence of the BR-CDF and study the impact of a…
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…
Blockchain systems need to solve consensus despite the presence of rational users and failures. The notion of $(k,t)$-robustness has shown instrumental to list problems that cannot be solved if $k$ players are rational and $t$ players are…
Existing blockchain systems scale poorly because of their distributed consensus protocols. Current attempts at improving blockchain scalability are limited to cryptocurrency. Scaling blockchain systems under general workloads (i.e.,…
Blockchain protocols typically aspire to run in the permissionless setting, in which nodes are owned and operated by a large number of diverse and unknown entities, with each node free to start or stop running the protocol at any time. This…
Despite recent progresses of practical asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus, the state-of-the-art designs still suffer from suboptimal performance. Particularly, to obtain maximum throughput, most existing protocols with…
Blockchain protocols differ in fundamental ways, including the mechanics of selecting users to produce blocks (e.g., proof-of-work vs. proof-of-stake) and the method to establish consensus (e.g., longest chain rules vs. Byzantine…
Motivated by proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains such as Ethereum, two key desiderata have recently been studied for Byzantine-fault tolerant (BFT) state-machine replication (SMR) consensus protocols: Finality means that the protocol retains…
Blockchain technologies are facing a scalability challenge, which must be overcome to guarantee a wider adoption of the technology. This scalability issue is mostly caused by the use of consensus algorithms to guarantee the total order of…