Paper 2023/1301
Short Paper: Accountable Safety Implies Finality
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
- Published elsewhere. Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2024
- Contact author(s)
-
jneu @ stanford edu
nusret @ stanford edu
dntse @ stanford edu - History
- 2023-12-28: last of 2 revisions
- 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 = {Short Paper: Accountable Safety Implies Finality},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2023/1301},
year = {2023},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1301}
}
