Scalable Byzantine Consensus via Hardware-Assisted Secret Sharing

The surging interest in blockchain technology has revitalized the search for effective Byzantine consensus schemes. In particular, the blockchain community has been looking for ways to effectively integrate traditional Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols into a blockchain consensus layer allowi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on computers Vol. 68; no. 1; pp. 139 - 151
Main Authors: Liu, Jian, Li, Wenting, Karame, Ghassan O., Asokan, N.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York IEEE 01.01.2019
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects:
Bitcoin
Blockchain
Byzantine fault-tolerance
Cryptography
distributed systems
Failure detection
Fault tolerance
Fault tolerant systems
Hardware
Protocols
Regeneration
Silicon
state machine replication
Topology optimization
trusted component
ISSN:0018-9340, 1557-9956
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The surging interest in blockchain technology has revitalized the search for effective Byzantine consensus schemes. In particular, the blockchain community has been looking for ways to effectively integrate traditional Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols into a blockchain consensus layer allowing various financial institutions to securely agree on the order of transactions. However, existing BFT protocols can only scale to tens of nodes due to their <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">O(n^2)</tex-math> <inline-graphic xlink:href="liu-ieq1-2860009.gif"/> </inline-formula> message complexity. In this paper, we propose FastBFT, a fast and scalable BFT protocol. At the heart of FastBFT is a novel message aggregation technique that combines hardware-based trusted execution environments (TEEs) with lightweight secret sharing. Combining this technique with several other optimizations (i.e., optimistic execution, tree topology and failure detection), FastBFT achieves low latency and high throughput even for large scale networks. Via systematic analysis and experiments, we demonstrate that FastBFT has better scalability and performance than previous BFT protocols.
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ISSN:0018-9340
1557-9956
DOI:10.1109/TC.2018.2860009