Paper 2020/1021
Consensus Redux: Distributed Ledgers in the Face of Adversarial Supremacy
Christian Badertscher, Peter Gaži, Aggelos Kiayias, Alexander Russell, and Vassilis Zikas
Abstract
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 their behavior and potential resilience to temporary spikes in adversarial resources. In this work we give the first thorough treatment of self-healing properties of distributed ledgers covering both proof-of-work (PoW) and proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols. Our results quantify the vulnerability period that corresponds to an adversarial spike and classify three types of currently deployed protocols with respect to their self-healing ability: PoW-based blockchains, PoS-based blockchains, and iterated Byzantine Fault Tolerant (iBFT) protocols.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Cryptographic protocols
- Publication info
- Preprint. MINOR revision.
- Keywords
- blockchainself-healingproof-of-workproof-of-stake
- Contact author(s)
-
christian badertscher @ iohk io
peter gazi @ iohk io
akiayias @ inf ed ac uk
acr @ cse uconn edu
vassilis zikas @ ed ac uk - History
- 2020-08-27: received
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2020/1021
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2020/1021,
author = {Christian Badertscher and Peter Gaži and Aggelos Kiayias and Alexander Russell and Vassilis Zikas},
title = {Consensus Redux: Distributed Ledgers in the Face of Adversarial Supremacy},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2020/1021},
year = {2020},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1021}
}
