Alexander Spiegelman

Zhuolun Xiang, Andrei Tonkikh, Alexander Spiegelman

Despite broad adoption of BFT consensus in blockchains, censorship resistance remains weak: existing designs offer limited inclusion guarantees and allow leaders to exclude transactions. We address this with a new abstraction and protocol stack. We define \emph{Prefix Consensus}, where parties input vectors and output two consistent vectors $(v^{\sf low},v^{\sf high})$ that extend the maximum common prefix of honest inputs and satisfy $v_i^{\sf low}\preceq v_j^{\sf high}$ for all honest parties $i,j$. We show that Prefix Consensus is solvable asynchronously and establish tight round-complexity bounds. We then define \emph{Strong Prefix Consensus}, which additionally requires agreement on the high output, and give a leaderless partially synchronous protocol. Using its accountable variant, we build a leaderless, multi-proposer, censorship-resistant BFT SMR protocol with amortized four-round commit latency under synchronized starts, while guaranteeing that after GST at most $f$ slots can be censored. Finally, we connect Prefix Consensus to graded consensus, obtaining a matching lower bound and a 3-round protocol, and derive leaderless Binary Consensus with improved worst-case complexity.

Alexander Spiegelman, Neil Giridharan, Alberto Sonnino et al.

We present Bullshark, the first directed acyclic graph (DAG) based asynchronous Byzantine Atomic Broadcast protocol that is optimized for the common synchronous case. Like previous DAG-based BFT protocols, Bullshark requires no extra communication to achieve consensus on top of building the DAG. That is, parties can totally order the vertices of the DAG by interpreting their local view of the DAG edges. Unlike other asynchronous DAG-based protocols, Bullshark provides a practical low latency fast-path that exploits synchronous periods and deprecates the need for notoriously complex view-change mechanisms. Bullshark achieves this while maintaining all the desired properties of its predecessor DAG-Rider. Namely, it has optimal amortized communication complexity, it provides fairness and asynchronous liveness, and safety is guaranteed even under a quantum adversary. In order to show the practicality and simplicity of our approach, we also introduce a standalone partially synchronous version of Bullshark which we evaluate against the state of the art. The implemented protocol is embarrassingly simple (200 LOC on top of an existing DAG-based mempool implementation (Narwhal & Tusk). It is highly efficient, achieving for example, 125,000 transaction per second with a 2 seconds latency for a deployment of 50 parties. In the same setting the state of the art pays a steep 50% latency increase as it optimizes for asynchrony.

George Danezis, Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias, Alberto Sonnino et al.

We propose separating the task of reliable transaction dissemination from transaction ordering, to enable high-performance Byzantine fault-tolerant quorum-based consensus. We design and evaluate a mempool protocol, Narwhal, specializing in high-throughput reliable dissemination and storage of causal histories of transactions. Narwhal tolerates an asynchronous network and maintains high performance despite failures. Narwhal is designed to easily scale-out using multiple workers at each validator, and we demonstrate that there is no foreseeable limit to the throughput we can achieve. Composing Narwhal with a partially synchronous consensus protocol (Narwhal-HotStuff) yields significantly better throughput even in the presence of faults or intermittent loss of liveness due to asynchrony. However, loss of liveness can result in higher latency. To achieve overall good performance when faults occur we design Tusk, a zero-message overhead asynchronous consensus protocol, to work with Narwhal. We demonstrate its high performance under a variety of configurations and faults. As a summary of results, on a WAN, Narwhal-Hotstuff achieves over 130,000 tx/sec at less than 2-sec latency compared with 1,800 tx/sec at 1-sec latency for Hotstuff. Additional workers increase throughput linearly to 600,000 tx/sec without any latency increase. Tusk achieves 160,000 tx/sec with about 3 seconds latency. Under faults, both protocols maintain high throughput, but Narwhal-HotStuff suffers from increased latency.

Rati Gelashvili, Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias, Alexander Spiegelman et al.

The popularity of permissioned blockchain systems demands BFT SMR protocols that are efficient under good network conditions (synchrony) and robust under bad network conditions (asynchrony). The state-of-the-art partially synchronous BFT SMR protocols provide optimal linear communication cost per decision under synchrony and good leaders, but lose liveness under asynchrony. On the other hand, the state-of-the-art asynchronous BFT SMR protocols are live even under asynchrony, but always pay quadratic cost even under synchrony. In this paper, we propose a BFT SMR protocol that achieves the best of both worlds -- optimal linear cost per decision under good networks and leaders, optimal quadratic cost per decision under bad networks, and remains always live.

Alexander Spiegelman

In this paper, we challenge the conventional approach of state machine replication systems to design deterministic agreement protocols in the eventually synchronous communication model. We first prove that no such protocol can guarantee bounded communication cost before the global stabilization time and propose a different approach that hopes for the best (synchrony) but prepares for the worst (asynchrony). Accordingly, we design an optimistic byzantine agreement protocol that first tries an efficient deterministic algorithm that relies on synchrony for termination only, and then, only if an agreement was not reached due to asynchrony, the protocol uses a randomized asynchronous protocol for fallback that guarantees termination with probability 1. We formally prove that our protocol achieves optimal communication complexity under all network conditions and failure scenarios. We first prove a lower bound of $Ω(ft+ t)$ for synchronous deterministic byzantine agreement protocols, where $t$ is the failure threshold, and $f$ is the actual number of failures. Then, we present a tight upper bound and use it for the synchronous part of the optimistic protocol. Finally, for the asynchronous fallback, we use a variant of the (optimal) VABA protocol, which we reconstruct to safely combine it with the synchronous part. We believe that our adaptive to failures synchronous byzantine agreement protocol has an independent interest since it is the first protocol we are aware of which communication complexity optimally depends on the actual number of failures.

Itay Tsabary, Alexander Spiegelman, Ittay Eyal

Proof of Work (PoW) is a Sybil-deterrence security mechanism. It introduces an external cost to a system by requiring computational effort to perform actions. However, since its inception, a central challenge was to tune this cost. Initial designs for deterring spam email and DoS attacks applied overhead equally to honest participants and attackers. Requiring too little effort did not deter attacks, whereas too much encumbered honest participation. This might be the reason it was never widely adopted. Nakamoto overcame this trade-off in Bitcoin by distinguishing desired from malicious behavior and introducing internal rewards for the former. This solution gained popularity in securing cryptocurrencies and using the virtual internally-minted tokens for rewards. However, in existing blockchain protocols the internal rewards fund (almost) the same value of external expenses. Thus, as the token value soars, so does the PoW expenditure. Bitcoin PoW, for example, already expends as much electricity as Colombia or Switzerland. This amount of resource-guzzling is unsustainable and hinders even wider adoption of these systems. In this work we present Hybrid Expenditure Blockchain (HEB), a novel PoW mechanism. HEB is a generalization of Nakamoto's protocol that enables tuning the external expenditure by introducing a complementary internal-expenditure mechanism. Thus, for the first time, HEB decouples external expenditure from the reward value. We show a practical parameter choice by which HEB requires significantly less external consumption compare to Nakamoto's protocol, its resilience against rational attackers is similar, and it retains the decentralized and permissionless nature of the system. Taking the Bitcoin ecosystem as an example, HEB cuts the electricity consumption by half.

Guy Goren, Alexander Spiegelman

In this paper we revisit the mining strategies in proof of work based cryptocurrencies and propose two strategies, we call smart and smarter mining, that in many cases strictly dominate honest mining. In contrast to other known attacks, like selfish mining, which induce zero-sum games among the miners, the strategies proposed in this paper increase miners' profit by reducing their variable costs (i.e., electricity). Moreover, the proposed strategies are viable for much smaller miners than previously known attacks, and surprisingly, an attack performed by one miner is profitable for all other miners as well. While saving electricity power is very encouraging for the environment, it is less so for the coin's security. The smart/smarter strategies expose the coin to under 50\% attacks and this vulnerability might only grow when new miners join the coin as a response to the increase in profit margins induced by these strategies.

Ittai Abraham, Dahlia Malkhi, Kartik Nayak et al.

The decentralized cryptocurrency Bitcoin has experienced great success but also encountered many challenges. One of the challenges has been the long confirmation time. Another challenge is the lack of incentives at certain steps of the protocol, raising concerns for transaction withholding, selfish mining, etc. To address these challenges, we propose Solida, a decentralized blockchain protocol based on reconfigurable Byzantine consensus augmented by proof-of-work. Solida improves on Bitcoin in confirmation time, and provides safety and liveness assuming the adversary control less than (roughly) one-third of the total mining power.