Paper 2022/796
Safe Permissionless Consensus
Abstract
Nakamoto's consensus protocol works in a permissionless model, where nodes can join and leave without notice. However, it guarantees agreement only probabilistically. Is this weaker guarantee a necessary concession to the severe demands of supporting a permissionless model? This paper shows that, at least in a benign failure model, it is not. It presents Sandglass, the first permissionless consensus algorithm that guarantees deterministic agreement and termination with probability 1 under general omission failures. Like Nakamoto, Sandglass adopts a hybrid synchronous communication model, where, at all times, a majority of nodes (though their number is unknown) are correct and synchronously connected, and allows nodes to join and leave at any time.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Applications
- Publication info
- Preprint.
- Keywords
- Consensus Permissionless Nakamoto Deterministic Safety
- Contact author(s)
-
yp348 @ cornell edu
la13 @ cornell edu
ittay @ technion ac il - History
- 2022-08-23: last of 2 revisions
- 2022-06-20: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2022/796
- License
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CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/796,
author = {Youer Pu and Lorenzo Alvisi and Ittay Eyal},
title = {Safe Permissionless Consensus},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2022/796},
year = {2022},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/796}
}
