SimpleFT: A Simple Byzantine Fault Tolerant Consensus

Rui Hao; Chenglong Yi; Weiqi Dai; Zhaonan Zhang

Paper 2024/132

SimpleFT: A Simple Byzantine Fault Tolerant Consensus

Rui Hao, Nanjing University

Chenglong Yi, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Weiqi Dai, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Zhaonan Zhang, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Abstract

Although having been popular for a long time, Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus under the partially-synchronous network is denounced to be inefficient or even infeasible in recent years, which calls for a more robust asynchronous consensus. On the other hand, almost all the existing asynchronous consensus are too complicated to understand and even suffer from the termination problem. Motivated by the above problems, we propose SimpleFT in this paper, which is a simple asynchronous consensus and is mainly inspired by the simplicity of the Bitcoin protocol. With a re-understanding of the Bitcoin protocol, we disassemble the life cycle of a block into three phases, namely proposal, dissemination, and confirmation. Corresponding to these phases, we devise or introduce the sortition algorithm, reliable broadcast algorithm, and quorum certificate mechanism in SimpleFT, respectively. To make full use of the network resources and improve the system throughput, we further introduce the layered architecture to SimpleFT, which enables multiple blocks to be confirmed at the same height. Comprehensive analysis is made to validate the correctness of SimpleFT and various experiments are conducted to demonstrate its efficient performance.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Applications
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Minor revision. IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing
DOI: 10.1109/TSUSC.2023.3341440
Keywords: consensus Byzantine fault tolerance blockchain asynchronous network
Contact author(s): rui hao gm @ gmail com
yichenglong2021 @ gmail com
History: 2024-01-31: approved; 2024-01-30: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2024/132
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2024/132,
      author = {Rui Hao and Chenglong Yi and Weiqi Dai and Zhaonan Zhang},
      title = {{SimpleFT}: A Simple Byzantine Fault Tolerant Consensus},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2024/132},
      year = {2024},
      doi = {10.1109/TSUSC.2023.3341440},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/132}
}