Towards Practical Sleepy BFT

Dahlia Malkhi, Atsuki Momose, Ling Ren

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

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 4Δ latency (Δ is the bound on network delay) in the best case, which is comparable to classic BFT protocols without dynamic participation support. Second, existing protocols have to assume that the set of corrupt participants remains fixed throughout the lifetime of the protocol due to a problem we call costless simulation. We resolve this problem and support growing participation of corrupt nodes. Our new protocol also offers several other important advantages, including support for arbitrary fluctuation of honest participation as well as an efficient recovery mechanism for new active nodes.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCCS 2023 - Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages490-503
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9798400700507
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 15 2023
Event30th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2023 - Copenhagen, Denmark
Duration: Nov 26 2023Nov 30 2023

Publication series

NameCCS 2023 - Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Conference

Conference30th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2023
Country/TerritoryDenmark
CityCopenhagen
Period11/26/2311/30/23

Keywords

  • BFT Protocols
  • Blockchain
  • Dynamic Participation
  • Sleepy Model

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Software

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