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Paper 2021/628

The Availability-Accountability Dilemma and its Resolution via Accountability Gadgets

Joachim Neu and Ertem Nusret Tas and David Tse

Abstract

For applications of Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols where the participants are economic agents, recent works highlighted the importance of accountability: the ability to identify participants who provably violate the protocol. At the same time, being able to reach consensus under dynamic levels of participation is desirable for censorship resistance. We identify an availability-accountability dilemma: in an environment with dynamic participation, no protocol can simultaneously be accountably-safe and live. We provide a resolution to this dilemma by constructing an optimally-resilient accountability gadget to checkpoint a longest chain protocol, such that the full ledger is live under dynamic participation and the checkpointed prefix ledger is accountable. Our accountability gadget construction is black-box and can use any BFT protocol which is accountable under static participation. Using HotStuff as the black box, we implemented our construction as a protocol for the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain, and our Internet-scale experiments with more than 4000 nodes show that the protocol can achieve the required scalability and has better latency than the current solution Gasper, while having the advantage of being provably secure.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords
blockchainconsensus
Contact author(s)
jneu @ stanford edu
nusret @ stanford edu
dntse @ stanford edu
History
2022-05-18: last of 2 revisions
2021-05-17: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2021/628
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY
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