Accountable Safety Implies Finality

Joachim Neu; Ertem Nusret Tas; David Tse

Paper 2023/1301

Accountable Safety Implies Finality

Joachim Neu

Ertem Nusret Tas

David Tse

Abstract

Motivated by proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains such as Ethereum, two key desiderata have recently been studied for Byzantine-fault tolerant (BFT) state-machine replication (SMR) consensus protocols: Finality means that the protocol retains consistency, as long as less than a certain fraction of validators are malicious, even in partially-synchronous environments that allow for temporary violations of assumed network delay bounds. Accountable safety means that in any case of inconsistency, a certain fraction of validators can be identified to have provably violated the protocol. Earlier works have developed impossibility results and protocol constructions for these properties separately. We show that accountable safety implies finality, thereby unifying earlier results.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Preprint.
Contact author(s): jneu @ stanford edu
nusret @ stanford edu
dntse @ stanford edu
History: 2023-09-02: approved; 2023-08-31: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2023/1301
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2023/1301,
      author = {Joachim Neu and Ertem Nusret Tas and David Tse},
      title = {Accountable Safety Implies Finality},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2023/1301},
      year = {2023},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1301}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1301}
}