SENATE: A Permissionless Byzantine Consensus Protocol in Wireless Networks
This addresses the need for real-time, secure decentralized consensus in open wireless systems, offering a novel approach to Sybil-proof mechanisms.
The authors tackled the problem of achieving permissionless Byzantine consensus in wireless networks without the high delay and low throughput of proof-of-work systems, by proposing SENATE, which selects nodes based on wireless network coordinates to prevent Sybil attacks and enables efficient consensus.
The blockchain technology has achieved tremendous success in open (permissionless) decentralized consensus by employing proof-of-work (PoW) or its variants, whereby unauthorized nodes cannot gain disproportionate impact on consensus beyond their computational power. However, PoW-based systems incur a high delay and low throughput, making them ineffective in dealing with real-time applications. On the other hand, byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithms with better delay and throughput performance have been employed in closed (permissioned) settings to avoid Sybil attacks. In this paper, we present Sybil-proof wirelEss Network coordinAte based byzanTine consEnsus (SENATE), which is based on the conventional BFT consensus framework yet works in open systems of wireless devices where faulty nodes may launch Sybil attacks. As in a Senate in the legislature where the quota of senators per state (district) is a constant irrespective with the population of the state, "senators" in SENATE are selected from participating distributed nodes based on their wireless network coordinates (WNC) with a fixed number of nodes per district in the WNC space. Elected senators then participate in the subsequent consensus reaching process and broadcast the result. Thereby, SENATE is proof against Sybil attacks since pseudonyms of a faulty node are likely to be adjacent in the WNC space and hence fail to be elected.