### Reputation-based state machine replication

##### Abstract

State machine replication (SMR) allows nodes to jointly maintain a consistent ledger, even when a part of nodes are Byzantine. To defend against and/or limit the impact of attacks launched by Byzantine nodes, there have been proposals that combine reputation mechanisms to SMR, where each node has a reputation value based on its historical behaviours, and the node’s voting power will be proportional to its reputation. Despite the promising features of reputation-based SMR, existing studies do not provide formal treatment on the reputation mechanism on SMR protocols, including the types of behaviours affecting the reputation, the security properties of the reputation mechanism, or the extra security properties of SMR using reputation mechanisms. In this paper, we provide the first formal study on the reputation-based SMR. We define the security properties of the reputation mechanism w.r.t. these misbehaviours. Based on the formalisation of the reputation mechanism, we formally define the reputation-based SMR, and identify a new property reputationconsistency that is necessary for ensuring reputation-based SMR’s safety. We then design a simple reputation mechanism that achieves all security properties in our formal model. To demonstrate the practicality, we combine our reputation mechanism to the Sync-HotStuff SMR protocol, yielding a simple and efficient reputation-based SMR at the cost of only an extra ∆ in latency, where ∆ is the maximum delay in synchronous networks.

Available format(s)
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Published elsewhere. 2022 IEEE 21st International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (NCA)
DOI
10.1109/NCA57778.2022.10013518
Keywords
state machine replicationconsensusblockchain
Contact author(s)
huangmuhong @ st xatu edu cn
me @ runchao rocks
duzhiqiang @ xatu edu cn
fuyanfang @ xatu edu cn
liuliangxin @ st xatu edu cn
History
2023-02-15: approved
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2023/169

CC BY-SA

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2023/169,
author = {Muhong Huang and Runchao Han and Zhiqiang Du and Yanfang Fu and Liangxin Liu},
title = {Reputation-based state machine replication},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2023/169},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.1109/NCA57778.2022.10013518},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/169}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/169}
}

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