Paper 2019/251
Consensus through Herding
T-H. Hubert Chan, Rafael Pass, and Elaine Shi
Abstract
State Machine Replication (SMR) is an important abstraction for a set
of nodes to agree on an ever-growing, linearly-ordered log of transactions.
In decentralized cryptocurrency applications, we would like to design
SMR protocols that 1) resist adaptive corruptions;
and 2) achieve small bandwidth and small confirmation time.
All past approaches towards constructing SMR
fail to achieve either small confirmation time or small bandwidth
under adaptive corruptions (without resorting to strong assumptions
such as the erasure model or proof-of-work).
We propose a novel paradigm for reaching consensus that departs significantly from classical approaches. Our protocol is inspired by a social phenomenon called herding, where people tend to make choices considered as the social norm. In our consensus protocol, leader election and voting are coalesced into a single (randomized) process: in every round, every node tries to cast a vote for what it views
as the {\it most popular} item so far: such a voting attempt is not always successful, but rather, successful with a certain probability. Importantly, the probability that the node is elected to vote for
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Publication info
- Preprint. MINOR revision.
- Keywords
- state machine replicationadaptive securitycommunication efficiency
- Contact author(s)
-
tszhubert @ gmail com
rafael @ cs cornell edu
runting @ gmail com - History
- 2019-02-28: received
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2019/251
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2019/251, author = {T-H. Hubert Chan and Rafael Pass and Elaine Shi}, title = {Consensus through Herding}, howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2019/251}, year = {2019}, url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/251} }