What a lovely hat

The COOL protocol of Chen (DISC'21) is a major advance that enables perfect security for various tasks (in particular, Byzantine Agreement in Synchrony and Reliable Broadcast in Asynchrony). For an input of size $L$ bits, its communication complexity is $O(nL+n^2 \log n)$, which is optimal up to a $\log n$ factor. Unfortunately, Chen’s analysis is rather intricate and complex. Our main contribution is a simple analysis of a new variant of COOL based on elementary counting arguments....

A Byzantine consensus protocol is essential in decentralized systems as the protocol ensures system consistency despite node failures. Research on consensus in wireless networks receives relatively less attention, while significant advancements in wired networks. However, consensus in wireless networks has equal significance as in wired networks. In this paper, we propose a new reliable broadcast protocol that can achieve reliability with high fault tolerance over than the SOTA (PODC...

\textit{Federated Learning} (FL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm that allows multiple clients to train models collaboratively without sharing local data. Numerous works have explored security and privacy protection in FL, as well as its integration with blockchain technology. However, existing FL works still face critical issues. \romannumeral1) It is difficult to achieving \textit{poisoning robustness} and \textit{data privacy} while ensuring high \textit{model accuracy}....

Asynchronous multiparty computation (AMPC) requires an input agreement phase where all participants have a consistent view of the set of private inputs. While the input agreement problem can be precisely addressed by a Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus known as Asynchronous Common Subset (ACS), existing ACS constructions with potential post-quantum security have a large $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(n^3)$ communication complexity for a network of $n$ nodes. This poses a bottleneck for AMPC in...

Multi-valued validated Byzantine agreement (MVBA), a fundamental primitive of distributed computing, enables $n$ processes to agree on a valid $\ell$-bit value, despite $t$ faulty processes behaving arbitrarily. Among hash-based protocols for the asynchronous setting with adaptive faults, the state-of-the-art HMVBA protocol has optimal $O(1)$ time complexity and near-optimal $O(n \ell + n^2 \kappa \log n)$ bit complexity, but tolerates only $t < n/5$ faults. We present REDUCER, an MVBA...

This paper presents a collection of lessons learned from analyzing the real-world security of various Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocol implementations. Drawing upon our experience as a team of security experts who have both developed and audited BFT systems, including BA★, HotStuff variants, Paxos variants, and DAG-based algorithms like Narwhal and Bullshark, we identify and analyze a variety of security vulnerabilities discovered in the translation of theoretical protocols...

Arma is a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus system designed to achieve horizontal scalability across all hardware resources: network bandwidth, CPU, and disk I/O. As opposed to preceding BFT protocols, Arma separates the dissemination and validation of client transactions from the consensus process, restricting the latter to totally ordering only metadata of batches of transactions. This separation enables each party to distribute compute and storage resources for transaction...

Understanding the fault tolerance of Byzantine Agreement protocols is an important question in distributed computing. While the setting of Byzantine faults has been thoroughly explored in the literature, the (arguably more realistic) omission fault setting is far less studied. In this paper, we revisit the recent work of Loss and Stern who gave the first protocol in the mixed fault model tolerating $t$ Byzantine faults, $s$ send faults, and $r$ receive faults, when $2t+r+s<n$ and omission...

Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols are known to suffer from the scalability issue. Indeed, their performance degrades drastically as the number of replicas $n$ grows. While a long line of work has attempted to achieve the scalability goal, these works can only scale to roughly a hundred replicas. In this paper, we develop BFT protocols from the so-called committee sampling approach that selects a small committee for consensus and conveys the results to all replicas. Such an...

State-of-the-art asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) protocols integrate a partially-synchronous optimistic path. The holy grail in this paradigm is to match the performance of a partially-synchronous protocol in favorable situations and match the performance of a purely asynchronous protocol in unfavorable situations. Several prior works have made progress toward this goal by matching the efficiency of a partially-synchronous protocol in favorable conditions. However, their...

We present Rondo, a scalable and reconfiguration-friendly distributed randomness beacon (DRB) protocol in the partially synchronous model. Rondo is the first DRB protocol that is built from batched asynchronous verifiable secret sharing (bAVSS) and meanwhile avoids the high $O(n^3)$ message cost, where $n$ is the number of nodes. Our key contribution lies in the introduction of a new variant of bAVSS called batched asynchronous verifiable secret sharing with partial output (bAVSS-PO)....

Multi-valued Validated Asynchronous Byzantine Agreement ($\mathsf{MVBA}$) is one essential primitive for many distributed protocols, such as asynchronous Byzantine fault-tolerant scenarios like atomic broadcast ($\mathsf{ABC}$), asynchronous distributed key generation, and many others. Recent efforts (Lu et al, PODC' 20) have pushed the communication complexity of $\mathsf{MVBA}$ to optimal $O(\ell n + \lambda n^2)$, which, however, heavily rely on ``heavyweight'' cryptographic tools,...

In recent years, decentralized computing has gained popularity in various domains such as decentralized learning, financial services and the Industrial Internet of Things. As identity privacy becomes increasingly important in the era of big data, safeguarding user identity privacy while ensuring the security of decentralized computing systems has become a critical challenge. To address this issue, we propose ADC (Anonymous Decentralized Computing) to achieve anonymity in decentralized...

Sharding enhances blockchain scalability by dividing the network into shards, each managing specific unspent transaction outputs or accounts. As an introduced new transaction type, cross-shard transactions pose a critical challenge to the security and efficiency of sharding blockchains. Currently, there is a lack of a generic sharding blockchain consensus pattern that achieves both security and low overhead. In this paper, we present Kronos, a secure sharding blockchain consensus...

Shared randomness in blockchain can expand its support for randomized applications and can also help strengthen its security. Many existing blockchains rely on external randomness beacons for shared randomness, but this approach reduces fault tolerance, increases latency, and complicates application development. An alternate approach is to let the blockchain validators generate fresh shared randomness themselves once for every block. We refer to such a design as the \emph{on-chain}...

To improve the throughput of Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocols, the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) topology has been introduced to parallel data processing, leading to the development of DAG-based BFT consensus. However, existing DAG-based works heavily rely on Reliable Broadcast (RBC) protocols for block broadcasting, which introduces significant latency due to the three communication steps involved in each RBC. For instance, DAGRider, a representative DAG-based protocol,...

To enable parallel processing, the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure is introduced to the design of asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols, known as DAG-based BFT. Existing DAG-based BFT protocols operate in successive waves, with each wave containing three or four Reliable Broadcast (RBC) rounds to broadcast data, resulting in high latency due to the three communication steps required in each RBC. For instance, Tusk, a state-of-the-art DAG-based BFT protocol,...

The conventional Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) paradigm requires replicated state machines to execute deterministic operations only. In practice, numerous applications and scenarios, especially in the era of blockchains, contain various sources of non-determinism. Despite decades of research on BFT, we still lack an efficient and easy-to-deploy solution for BFT with non-determinism—BFT-ND, especially in the asynchronous setting. We revisit the problem of BFT-ND and provide a formal and...

Although having been popular for a long time, Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus under the partially-synchronous network is denounced to be inefficient or even infeasible in recent years, which calls for a more robust asynchronous consensus. On the other hand, almost all the existing asynchronous consensus are too complicated to understand and even suffer from the termination problem. Motivated by the above problems, we propose SimpleFT in this paper, which is a simple asynchronous...

This paper examines the vulnerabilities inherent in prevailing Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) systems reliant on centralized Certificate Authorities (CAs), wherein a compromise of the CA introduces risks to the integrity of public key management. We present PKChain, a decentralized and compromise-tolerant public key management system built on blockchain technology, offering transparent, tamper-resistant, and verifiable services for key operations such as registration, update, query,...

Regular access to unpredictable and bias-resistant randomness is important for applications such as blockchains, voting, and secure distributed computing. Distributed random beacon protocols address this need by distributing trust across multiple nodes, with the majority of them assumed to be honest. Numerous applications across the blockchain space have led to the proposal of several distributed random beacon protocols, with some already implemented. However, many current random beacon...

Central Bank Digital Currencies refer to the digitization of lifecycle's of central bank money in a way that meets first of a kind requirements for transparency in transaction processing, interoperability with legacy or new world, and resilience that goes beyond the traditional crash fault tolerant model. This comes in addition to legacy system requirements for privacy and regulation compliance, that may differ from central bank to central bank. This paper introduces a novel framework for...

The Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) protocol is a long-standing topic. Recently, a lot of efforts have been made in the research of asynchronous BFT. However, the existing solutions cannot adapt well to the flexible network environment, and suffer from problems such as high communication complexity or long latency. To improve the efficiency of BFT consensus in flexible networks, we propose FaBFT. FaBFT's clients can make their own assumptions about the network conditions, and make the most...

We present new lower and upper bounds on the number of communication rounds required for asynchronous Crusader Agreement (CA) and Binding Crusader Agreement (BCA), two primitives that are used for solving binary consensus. We show results for the information theoretic and authenticated settings. In doing so, we present a generic model for proving round complexity lower bounds in the asynchronous setting. In some settings, our attempts to prove lower bounds on round complexity fail....

Byzantine atomic broadcast (ABC) is at the heart of permissioned blockchains and various multi-party computation protocols. We resolve a long-standing open problem in ABC, presenting the first information-theoretic (IT) and signature-free asynchronous ABC protocol that achieves optimal $O(n^2)$ messages and $O(1)$ expected time. Our ABC protocol adopts a new design, relying on a reduction from---perhaps surprisingly---a somewhat neglected primitive called multivalued Byzantine agreement (MBA).

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 consistency, as long as less than a certain fraction of validators are malicious, even in partially-synchronous environments that allow for temporary violations of assumed network delay bounds. Accountable safety means that in any case of inconsistency, a...

We present Phoenixx, a round and leader based Byzantine fault tolerant consensus protocol, that operates in the partial synchrony network communications model. Phoenixx combines the three phase approach from HotStuff, with a novel Endorser Sampling, that selects a subset of nodes, called endorsers, to "compress'' the opinion of the network. Unlike traditional sampling approaches that select a subset of the network to run consensus on behalf of the network and disseminate the outcome,...

Contact discovery is a crucial component of social applications, facilitating interactions between registered contacts. This work introduces Arke, a novel approach to contact discovery that addresses the limitations of existing solutions in terms of privacy, scalability, and reliance on trusted third parties. Arke ensures the unlinkability of user interactions, mitigates enumeration attacks, and operates without single points of failure or trust. Notably, Arke is the first contact discovery...

Byzantine fault-tolerant state machine replication (BFT-SMR) replicates a state machine across a set of replicas, and processes requests as a single machine even in the presence of Byzantine faults. Recently, synchronous BFT-SMRs have received tremendous attention due to their simple design and high fault-tolerance threshold. In this paper, we propose Arena, the first multi-leader synchronous BFT-SMR. Thanks to the synchrony assumption, Arena gains the performance benefit from...

To reduce latency and communication overhead of asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus, an optimistic path is often added, with Ditto and BDT as state-of-the-art representatives. These protocols first attempt to run an optimistic path that is typically adapted from partially-synchronous BFT and promises good performance in good situations. If the optimistic path fails to make progress, these protocols switch to a pessimistic path after a timeout, to guarantee liveness in an...

Due to the significant development of the intelligence industry worldwide, various initiatives have increasingly recognized the value of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT systems, however, are often hin- dered by fundamental challenges, such as the need for a central server to manage them. Decentralizing these systems can be achieved through the use of blockchains. Recently, there has been an increase in the popularity of blockchain in various fields, such as banking, IoT, and the...

We present a theoretical framework for analyzing the efficiency of consensus protocols, and apply it to analyze the optimistic and pessimistic confirmation times of state-of-the-art partially-synchronous protocols in the so-called "rotating leader/random leader" model of consensus (recently popularized in the blockchain setting). We next present a new and simple consensus protocol in the partially synchronous setting, tolerating $f < n/3$ byzantine faults; in our eyes, this protocol is...

Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) protocols that are based on Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) are attractive due to their many advantages in asynchronous blockchain systems. These DAG-based protocols can be viewed as a simulation of some BFT protocol on a DAG. Many DAG-based BFT protocols rely on randomization, since they are used for agreement and ordering of transactions, which cannot be achieved deterministically in asynchronous systems. Randomization is achieved either through local sources...

Asynchronous common subset (ACS) is a powerful paradigm enabling applications such as Byzantine fault-tolerance (BFT) and multi-party computation (MPC). The most efficient ACS framework in the information-theoretic setting is due to Ben-Or, Kelmer, and Rabin (BKR, 1994). The BKR ACS protocol has been both theoretically and practically impactful. However, the BKR protocol has an $O(\log n)$ running time (where $n$ is the number of replicas) due to the usage of $n$ parallel asynchronous...

Asynchronous Byzantine fault-tolerance (BFT) protocols (e.g., HoneyBadger and Dumbo family protocols) have received increasing attention as the consensus mechanism of permissioned blockchains, given their particular robustness against timing and performance attacks. However, there is a substantial performance gap before they can be applied in real systems. In this paper, we identify and address two critical issues, and design Dory, an asynchronous BFT consensus protocol with improved...

Bitcoin's longest-chain protocol pioneered consensus under dynamic participation, also known as sleepy consensus, where nodes do not need to be permanently active. However, existing solutions for sleepy consensus still face two major issues, which we address in this work. First, existing sleepy consensus protocols have high latency (either asymptotically or concretely). We tackle this problem and achieve $4\Delta$ latency ($\Delta$ is the bound on network delay) in the best case, which is...

We provide an expressive framework that allows analyzing and generating provably secure, state-of-the-art Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols. Our framework is hierarchical, including three layers. The top layer is used to model the message pattern and abstract key functions on which BFT algorithms can be built. The intermediate layer provides the core functions with high-level properties sufficient to prove the security of the top-layer algorithms. The bottom layer carefully defines...

Public blockchains are state machines replicated via distributed consensus protocols. Information on blockchains is public by default---marking privacy as one of the key challenges. We identify two shortcomings of existing approaches to building blockchains for general privacy-preserving applications, namely (1) the reliance on external trust assumptions and (2) the dependency on execution environments (on-chain, off-chain, zero-knowledge, etc.) with heterogeneous programming...

Secret sharing is an essential tool for many distributed applications, including distributed key generation and multiparty computation. For many practical applications, we would like to tolerate network churn, meaning participants can dynamically enter and leave the pool of protocol participants as they please. Such protocols, called Dynamic-committee Proactive Secret Sharing (DPSS), have recently been studied; however, existing DPSS protocols do not gracefully handle faults: the presence...

In 1985, Dolev and Reischuk proved a fundamental communication lower bounds on protocols achieving fault tolerant synchronous broadcast and consensus: any deterministic protocol solving those tasks (even against omission faults) requires at least a quadratic number of messages to be sent by nonfaulty parties. In contrast, many blockchain systems achieve consensus with seemingly linear communication per instance against Byzantine faults. We explore this dissonance in three main ways. First,...

State-of-the-art Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols assuming partial synchrony such as SBFT and HotStuff use \textit{regular certificates} obtained from $2f+1$ (partial) signatures. We show that one can use \textit{weak certificates} obtained from only $f+1$ signatures to \textit{assist} in designing more robust and more efficient BFT protocols. We design and implement two BFT systems: Dashing (a family of two HotStuff-style BFT protocols) and Star (a parallel BFT framework). We...

This paper studies dynamic BFT, where replicas can join and leave the system dynamically, a primitive that is nowadays increasingly needed. We provide a formal treatment for dynamic BFT protocols, endowing them with a flexible syntax and various security definitions. We demonstrate the challenges of extending static BFT to dynamic BFT. Then we design and implement Dyno, a highly efficient dynamic BFT protocol under the partial synchrony model. We show that Dyno can seamlessly handle...

Byzantine reliable broadcast (BRB) is one of the most fundamental primitives in fault-tolerant distributed computing. It is well-known that the best BRB protocol one can hope for has $O(nL+n^2)$ communication. It is unclear if this bound is achievable. This paper provides a novel BRB protocol---BRB1, which achieves $O(nL + kn + n^2 log n)$ communication, where $n$, $L$, and $k$ are the number of replicas, the message length, and the security parameter, respectively. Our protocol is...

As the first Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocol with linear communication complexity, HotStuff (PODC 2019) has received significant attention. HotStuff has three round-trips for both normal case operations and view change protocols. Follow-up studies attempt to reduce the number of phases for HotStuff. These protocols, however, all give up of one thing in return for another. This paper presents Marlin, a BFT protocol with linearity, having two phases for normal case operations and two...

We present UnTraceable Transactions (UTT), a system for decentralized ecash with accountable privacy. UTT is the first ecash system that obtains three critical properties: (1) it provides decentralized trust by implementing the ledger, bank, auditor, and registration authorities via threshold cryptography and Byzantine Fault Tolerant infrastructure; (2) it balances accountability and privacy by implementing anonymity budgets: users can anonymously send payments, but only up to a limited...

This paper improves upon two fundamental and closely related primitives in fault-tolerant distributed computing---Byzantine reliable broadcast (BRB) and asynchronous verifiable information dispersal (AVID). We make improvements asymptotically (for our AVID construction), concretely (much lower hidden constants), and practically (having 3 steps, using hash functions only, and avoiding using online error correction on the bulk data). The state of the art BRB protocol of Das, Xiang, and Ren...

We present Shanrang, the first fully asynchronous proactive secret sharing scheme with dynamic committee support. Even in the worst possible network environment, where messages could have arbitrary latencies, Shanrang allows a dynamic committee to store a secret and periodically refresh the secret shares in a distributed fashion. When the committee changes, both the old committee and the new committee jointly refresh and transfer the shares to the new committee, without revealing the secret...

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) is a fundamental problem in secure distributed computing. An MPC protocol allows a set of $n$ mutually distrusting parties to carry out any joint computation of their private inputs, without disclosing any additional information about their inputs. MPC with information-theoretic security (also called unconditional security) provides the strongest security guarantees and remains secure even against computationally unbounded adversaries. Perfectly-secure...

We introduce Zef, the first Byzantine-Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocol to support payments in anonymous digital coins at arbitrary scale. Zef follows the communication and security model of FastPay: both protocols are asynchronous, low-latency, linearly-scalable, and powered by partially-trusted sharded authorities. In contrast with FastPay, user accounts in Zef are uniquely-identified and safely removable. Zef coins are bound to an account by a digital certificate and otherwise stored...

Asynchronous BFT consensus can implement robust mission-critical decentralized services in the unstable or even adversarial wide-area network without relying on any form of timing assumption. Starting from the work of HoneyBadgerBFT (CCS 2016), several studies tried to push asynchronous BFT towards practice. In particular, in a recent work of Dumbo (CCS 2020), they redesigned the protocol backbone and used one multi-valued validated Byzantine agreement (MVBA) to replace $n$ concurrent...

Asynchronous Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols assuming no timing assumptions are inherently more robust than their partially synchronous counterparts, but typically have much weaker security guarantees. We design and implement WaterBear, a family of new and efficient asynchronous BFT protocols matching all security guarantees of partially synchronous protocols. To achieve the goal, we have developed the local coin (flipping a coin locally and independently at each replica)...

The classic asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) framework of Ben-Or, Kemler, and Rabin (BKR) and its descendants rely on reliable broadcast (RBC) and asynchronous binary agreement (ABA). However, BKR does not allow all ABA instances to run in parallel, a well-known performance bottleneck. We propose PACE, a generic framework that removes the bottleneck, allowing fully parallelizable ABA instances. PACE is built on RBC and reproposable ABA (RABA). Different from the conventional...

Distributed key generation (DKG) is an important building block in designing many efficient distributed protocols. In this work, we initiate the study of communication complexity and latency of distributed key generation protocols under a synchronous network in a point-to-point network. Our key result is the first synchronous DKG protocol for discrete log-based cryptosystems with $O(\kappa n^3)$ communication complexity ($\kappa$ denotes a security parameter) that tolerates $t < n/2$...

Blockchain as a potentially disruptive technology can advance many different fields, e.g., cryptocurrencies, supply chains, and the industrial Internet of Things. The next-generation blockchain ecosystem is expected to consist of various homogeneous and heterogeneous distributed ledgers. These ledger systems will inevitably require a certain level of proper cooperation of multiple blockchains to enrich advanced functionalities and enhance interoperable capabilities for future applications....

Erasure coding is a key tool to reduce the space and communication overhead in fault-tolerant distributed computing. State-of-the-art distributed primitives, such as asynchronous verifiable information dispersal (AVID), reliable broadcast (RBC), multi-valued Byzantine agreement (MVBA), and atomic broadcast, all use erasure coding. This paper introduces an erasure coding proof (ECP) system, which allows the encoder to prove succinctly and non-interactively that an erasure-coded fragment is...

The problem of Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) has received a lot of attention in the last 30 years. The seminal work by Fisher, Lynch, and Paterson (FLP) shows that there does not exist a deterministic BFT protocol in complete asynchronous networks against a single failure. In order to address this challenge, researchers have designed randomized BFT protocols in asynchronous networks and deterministic BFT protocols in partial synchronous networks. For both kinds of protocols, a basic...

This paper explores the good-case latency of synchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols in the rotating leader setting. We first present a lower bound that relates the latency of a broadcast when the sender is honest and the latency of switching to the next sender. We then present a matching upper bound with a latency of $2\Delta$ ($\Delta$ is the pessimistic synchronous delay) with an optimistically responsive change to the next sender. The results imply that both our...

Blockchain as an enabler to current Internet infrastructure has provided many unique features and revolutionized current distributed systems into a new era. Its decentralization, immutability, and transparency have attracted many applications to adopt the design philosophy of blockchain and customize various replicated solutions. Under the hood of blockchain, consensus protocols play the most important role to achieve distributed replication systems. The distributed system community has...

Though recent breakthroughs greatly improved the efficiency of asynchronous Byzantine agreement (BA) protocols, they mainly focused on the setting with private setups, e.g., assuming established non-interactive threshold cryptosystems. Challenges remain to reduce the large communication complexities in the absence of such setups. For example, Abraham et al. (PODC'21) recently gave the first private-setup free construction for asynchronous validated BA (VBA) with expected $\mathcal{O}(n^3)$...

Consensus protocols enable $n$ parties, each holding some input string, to agree on a common output even in the presence of corrupted parties. While the problem is well understood in the classic byzantine setting, recent work has pushed to understand the problem when realistic types of failures are considered and a majority of parties may be corrupt. Garay and Perry consider a model with both byzantine and crash faults and develop a corruption-optimal protocol with perfect security...

Classic Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) protocols are designed for a specific timing model, most often one of the following: synchronous, asynchronous or partially synchronous. It is well known that the timing model and fault tolerance threshold present inherent trade-offs. Synchronous protocols tolerate up to $n/2$ Byzantine faults, while asynchronous or partially synchronous protocols tolerate only up to $n/3$ Byzantine faults. In this work, we generalize the fault thresholds of BFT and...

We present the Internet Computer Consensus (ICC) family of protocols for atomic broadcast (a.k.a., consensus), which underpin the Byzantine fault-tolerant replicated state machines of the Internet Computer. The ICC protocols are leader-based protocols that assume partial synchrony, and that are fully integrated with a blockchain. The leader changes probabilistically in every round. These protocols are extremely simple and robust: in any round where the leader is corrupt (which itself...

For applications of Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols where the participants are economic agents, recent works highlighted the importance of accountability: the ability to identify participants who provably violate the protocol. At the same time, being able to reach consensus under dynamic levels of participation is desirable for censorship resistance. We identify an availability-accountability dilemma: in an environment with dynamic participation, no protocol can...

BFT protocols in the synchronous setting rely on a strong assumption: every message sent by a party will arrive at its destination within a known bounded time. To allow some degree of asynchrony while still tolerating a minority corruption, recently, in Crypto'19, a weaker synchrony assumption called mobile sluggish faults was introduced. In this work, we investigate the support for mobile sluggish faults in existing synchronous protocols such as Dfinity, Streamlet, Sync HotStuff, OptSync...

A great challenge for distributed payment systems is their compliance with regulations, such as anti-money laundering, insolvency legislation, countering the financing of terrorism and sanctions laws. After Bitcoin's MtGox scandal, one of the most needed auditing functionalities for financial solvency and tax reporting purposes is to prove ownership of blockchain reserves, a process known as Proof of Assets (PoA). This work formalizes the PoA requirements in account-based blockchains,...

Verifiable Secret-Sharing (VSS) is a fundamental primitive in secure distributed computing. It is used as an important building block in several distributed computing tasks, such as Byzantine agreement and secure multi-party computation. VSS has been widely studied in various dimensions over the last three decades and several important results have been achieved related to the fault-tolerance, round-complexity and communication efficiency of VSS schemes. In this article, we consider VSS...

Blockchain has been practiced in crypto-currencies and crossborder banking settlement. However, no clear evidence that a distributed ledger network (or Blockchain) is built within domestic payment systems, although many experts believe that Blockchain has wide applicability in various industries and disciplines. As the author’s best knowledge, no one has published a clear architecture and a feasible framework for a Blockchain-based banking network. Thus, \how Blockchain can be implemented in...

Agreement protocols for partially synchronous or asynchronous networks tolerate fewer than one-third Byzantine faults. If parties are equipped with trusted hardware that prevents equivocation, then fault tolerance can be improved to fewer than one-half Byzantine faults, but typically at the cost of increased communication complexity. In this work, we present results that use small trusted hardware without worsening communication complexity assuming the adversary controls a fraction of the...

Most existing Byzantine fault-tolerant State Machine Replication (SMR) protocols rely explicitly on either equivocation detection or quorum certificate formations to ensure protocol safety. These mechanisms inherently require $O(n^2)$ communication overhead among $n$ participating servers. This work proposes the Unique Chain Rule (UCR), a simple rule for hash chains where extending a block by including its hash in the next block, is treated as a vote for the proposed block \textit{and...

Random beacon protocols provide a continuous public source of randomness and their applications range from public lotteries to zero-knowledge proofs. Existing random beacon protocols in the bounded synchronous model sacrifice either the fault tolerance or the communication complexity for security, or ease of reconfigurability. This work overcomes the challenges with the existing works through a novel communication efficient combination of state machine replication and (publicly) verifiable...

We consider leader-based Byzantine state machine replication, a.k.a. "BFT", under partial synchrony. We provide a generic solution enabling to match simultaneously, for the first time, three arguably gold standards of BFT: in two phases, with a responsive view change and a linear complexity per view. It is based on a new threshold primitive, which we call Proofs of non-Supermajority (or PnS for short). A PnS system enables players, each with an input number, to report their input to a...

Most state machine replication protocols are either based on the 40-years-old Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) theory or the more recent Nakamoto’s longest chain design. Longest chain protocols, designed originally in the Proof-of-Work (PoW) setting, are available under dynamic participation, but has probabilistic confirmation with long latency dependent on the security parameter. BFT protocols, designed for the permissioned setting, has fast deterministic confirmation, but assume a fixed...

The specific order of commands agreed upon when running state machine replication (SMR) is immaterial to fault-tolerance: all that is required is for all correct deterministic replicas to follow it. In the permissioned blockchains that rely on Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) SMR, however, nodes have a stake in the specific sequence that ledger records, as well as in preventing other parties from manipulating the sequencing to their advantage. The traditional specification of SMR correctness,...

Distributed ledgers, such as those arising from blockchain protocols, have been touted as the centerpiece of an upcoming security-critical information technology infrastructure. Their basic properties---consistency and liveness---can be guaranteed under specific constraints about the resources of an adversary relative to the resources of the nodes that follow the protocol. Given the intended long-livedness of these protocols, perhaps the most fundamental open security question currently is...

Generating randomness collectively has been a long standing problem in distributed computing. It plays a critical role not only in the design of state-of-the-art BFT and blockchain protocols, but also for a range of applications far beyond this field. We present RandRunner, a random beacon protocol with a unique set of guarantees that targets a realistic system model. Our design avoids the necessity of a (Byzantine fault-tolerant) consensus protocol and its accompanying high complexity and...

In this paper, we present an optimally-resilient, unconditionally-secure asynchronous multi-party computation (AMPC) protocol for $n$ parties, tolerating a computationally unbounded adversary, capable of corrupting up to $t < \frac{n}{3}$ parties. Our protocol needs a communication of ${\cal O}(n^4)$ field elements per multiplication gate. This is to be compared with previous best AMPC protocol (Patra et al, ICITS 2009) in the same setting, which needs a communication of ${\cal O}(n^5)$...

The advent of decentralized trading markets introduces a number of new challenges for consensus protocols. In addition to the 'usual' attacks - a subset of the validators trying to prevent disagreement -- there is now the possibility of financial fraud, which can abuse properties not normally considered critical in consensus protocols. We investigate the issues of attackers manipulating or exploiting the order in which transactions are scheduled in the blockchain. More concretely, we look...

Multi-valued validated asynchronous Byzantine agreement (MVBA), proposed in the elegant work of Cachin et al. (CRYPTO '01), is fundamental for critical fault-tolerant services such as atomic broadcast in the asynchronous network. It was left as an open problem to asymptotically reduce the $O(ln^2+n^2*lambda+n^3)$ communication (where $n$ is the number of parties, $l$ is the input length, and $lambda$ is the security parameter). Recently, Abraham et al. (PODC '19) removed the $n^3$ term to...

Security and Scalability are two major challenges that IoT is currently facing. Access control to critical IoT infrastructure is considered as top security challenge that IoT faces. Data generated by IoT devices may be driving many hard real time systems, thus it is of utmost importance to guarantee integrity and authenticity of the data and resources at the first place itself. Due to heterogeneous and constrained nature of IoT devices, traditional IoT security frameworks are not able to...

Synchronous consensus protocols, by definition, have a worst-case commit latency that depends on the bounded network delay. The notion of optimistic responsiveness was recently introduced to allow synchronous protocols to commit instantaneously when some optimistic conditions are met. In this work, we revisit this notion of optimistic responsiveness and present optimal latency results. We present a lower bound for Byzantine Broadcast that relates the latencies of optimistic and synchronous...

Optimistic responsiveness was introduced to shorten the latency of a synchronous Byzantine consensus protocol that is inherently lower bounded by the pessimistic bound on the network delay $\Delta$. It states that a protocol makes a decision with latency on the order of actual network delay $ \delta $ if the number of actual faults is significantly smaller than $f$, which is the worst-case allowed. In this paper, we investigate if a Byzantine consensus can simultaneously achieve (i)...

Ethereum Research team has proposed a family of Casper blockchain consensus protocols. It has been shown in the literature that the Casper Friendly Finality Gadget (Casper FFG) cannot achieve liveness property in partially synchronous networks such as the Internet environment. The ``Correct-by-Construction'' family of Casper blockchain consensus protocols (CBC Casper) has been proposed as a finality gadget for the future Proof-of-Stake (PoS) based Ethereum blockchain. Unfortunately, no...

Multi-valued Byzantine Consensus (BC), in which $n$ processes must reach agreement on a single $L$-bit value, is an essential primitive in the design of distributed cryptographic protocols and fault-tolerant distributed systems. One of the most desirable traits for a multi-valued BC protocol is to be error-free. In other words, have zero probability of producing incorrect results. The most efficient error-free multi-valued BC protocols are built as extension protocols, which reduce...

We present a novel framework for asynchronous permissioned blockchain with high performance and post-quantum security for the first time. Specifically, our framework contains two asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (aBFT) protocols SodsBC and SodsBC++. We leverage concurrently preprocessing to accelerate the preparation of three cryptographic objects for the repeated consensus procedure, including common random coins as the needed randomness, secret shares of symmetric encryption keys for...

The problem of Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) in partial synchronous networks has received a lot of attention in the last 30 years. There are two types of widely accepted definitions for partial synchronous networks. This paper shows that several widely deployed BFT protocols would reach deadlocks in the widely accepted Type II partial synchronous networks (that is, they will not achieve liveness property). Based on the analysis of BFT security requirements for partial synchronous networks,...

Winkle protects any validator-based byzantine fault tolerant consensus mechanisms, such as those used in modern Proof-of-Stake blockchains, against long-range attacks where old validators’ signature keys get compromised. Winkle is a decentralized secondary layer of client-based validation, where a client includes a single additional field into a transaction that they sign: a hash of the previously sequenced block. The block that gets a threshold of signatures (confirmations) weighted by...

Metering is a critical process in large-scale distributed industrial plants, which enables multiple plants to collaborate to offer mutual services without outside interference. When distributed plants measure the data from a shared common source, e.g., flow metering in an oil pipeline, trustworthiness and immutability must be guaranteed among them. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical and scalable blockchain-based secure metering system, \textit{SMChain}, to provide strong security,...

In the Bitcoin white paper, Nakamoto proposed a very simple Byzantine fault tolerant consensus algorithm that is also known as Nakamoto consensus. Despite its simplicity, some existing analysis of Nakamoto consensus appears to be long and involved. In this technical report, we aim to make such analysis simple and transparent so that we can teach senior undergraduate students and graduate students in our institutions. This report is largely based on a 3-hour tutorial given by one of the...

We review several solutions for the Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) problem and discuss some aspects that are frequently overlooked by existing literatures. For example, PBFT and HotStuff BFT protocols (HotStuff has been adopted by Facebook Libra) require a reliable broadcast primitive. We show that if the broadcast primitive is not reliable then the PBFT and HotStuff BFT protocols could not achieve the liveness property (that is, the system will never reach an agreement on a proposal)....

Typically, protocols for Byzantine agreement (BA) are designed to run in either a synchronous network (where all messages are guaranteed to be delivered within some known time $\Delta$ from when they are sent) or an asynchronous network (where messages may be arbitrarily delayed). Protocols designed for synchronous networks are generally insecure if the network in which they run does not ensure synchrony; protocols designed for asynchronous networks are (of course) secure in a synchronous...

Most existing blockchains either rely on a Nakamoto-style of consensus, where the chain can fork and produce rollbacks, or on a committee-based Byzantine fault tolerant (CBFT) consensus, where no rollbacks are possible. While the latter ones offer better consistency, the former tolerate more corruptions. To achieve the best of both worlds, we initiate the formal study of finality layers. Such a finality layer can be combined with a Nakamoto-style blockchain (NSB) and periodically declare...

Synchronous solutions for Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) can tolerate up to minority faults. In this work, we present Sync HotStuff, a surprisingly simple and intuitive synchronous BFT solution that achieves consensus with a latency of $2\Delta$ in the steady state (where $\Delta$ is a synchronous message delay upper bound). In addition, Sync HotStuff ensures safety in a weaker synchronous model in which the synchrony assumption does not have to hold for all replicas all the time. Moreover,...

The importance of efficient MPC in today's world needs no retelling. An obvious barebones requirement to execute protocols for MPC is the ability of parties to communicate with each other. Traditionally, we solve this problem by assuming that every pair of parties in the network share a dedicated secure link that enables reliable message transmission. This assumption is clearly impractical as the number of nodes in the network grows, as it has today. In their seminal work, Dwork, Peleg,...

A blockchain system is a replicated state machine that must be fault tolerant. When designing a blockchain system, there is usually a trade-off between decentralization, scalability, and security. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain system, DEXON, which achieves high scalability while remaining decentralized and robust in the real-world environment. We have two main contributions. First, we present a highly scalable sharding framework for blockchain. This framework takes an...

Most classical consensus protocols rely on a leader to coordinate nodes’ voting efforts. One novel idea that stems from blockchain-style consensus is to rely, instead, on a “longest-chain” idea for such coordination. Such a longest-chain idea was initially considered in randomized protocols, where in each round, a node has some probability of being elected a leader who can propose the next block. Recently, well-known systems have started implementing the deterministic counterpart of such...

We present a simple, deterministic protocol for ledger consensus that tolerates Byzantine faults. The protocol is executed by $n$ servers over a synchronous network and can tolerate any number $t$ of Byzantine faults with $t<n/3$. Furthermore, the protocol can offer (i) transaction processing at full network speed, in the optimistic case where no faults occur, (ii) instant confirmation: the client can be assured in a single round-trip time that a submitted transaction will be settled,...

We present new protocols for Byzantine agreement in the synchronous and authenticated setting, tolerating the optimal number of $f$ faults among $n=2f+1$ parties. Our protocols achieve an expected $O(1)$ round complexity and an expected $O(n^2)$ communication complexity. The exact round complexity in expectation is 10 for a static adversary and 16 for a strongly rushing adaptive adversary. For comparison, previous protocols in the same setting require expected 29 rounds.

We present Helix, a Byzantine fault tolerant and scalable consensus algorithm for fair ordering of transactions among nodes in a distributed network. In Helix, one among the network nodes proposes a potential set of successive transactions (block). The known PBFT protocol is then run within a bounded-size committee in order to achieve agreement and commit the block to the blockchain indefinitely. In Helix, transactions are encrypted via a threshold encryption scheme in order to hide...

Tendermint-core blockchains (e.g. Cosmos) are considered today one of the most viable alternatives for the highly energy consuming proof-of-work blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Their particularity is that they aim at offering strong consistency (no forks) in an open system combining two ingredients (i) a set of validators that generate blocks via a variant of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant (PBFT) consensus protocol and (ii) a selection strategy that dynamically selects nodes to...

In state-of-the-art e-voting systems, a bulletin board (BB) is a critical component for preserving election integrity and availability. Although it is common in the literature to assume that a BB is a centralized entity that is trusted, in the recent works of Culnane and Schneider [CSF 2014] and Chondros et al. [ICDCS 2016], the importance of removing BB as a single point of failure has been extensively discussed. Motivated by these works, we introduce a framework for the formal security...