No-Commit Proofs: Defeating Livelock in BFT

Neil Giridharan; Heidi Howard; Ittai Abraham; Natacha Crooks; Alin Tomescu

Paper 2021/1308

No-Commit Proofs: Defeating Livelock in BFT

Neil Giridharan, Heidi Howard, Ittai Abraham, Natacha Crooks, and Alin Tomescu

Abstract

This paper presents the design and evaluation of Wendy, the first Byzantine consensus protocol that achieves optimal latency (two phases), linear authenticator complexity, and optimistic responsiveness. Wendy's core technical contribution is a novel aggregate signature scheme that allows leaders to prove, with constant pairing cost, that an operation did not commit. This No-commit proof addresses prior liveness concerns in protocols with linear authenticator complexity (including view change), allowing Wendy to commit operations in two-phases only.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Foundations
Publication info: Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords: Distributed computing blockchains consensus protocols aggregate signatures state machine replication
Contact author(s): giridhn @ berkeley edu
History: 2021-09-28: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2021/1308
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2021/1308,
      author = {Neil Giridharan and Heidi Howard and Ittai Abraham and Natacha Crooks and Alin Tomescu},
      title = {No-Commit Proofs: Defeating Livelock in {BFT}},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2021/1308},
      year = {2021},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1308}
}