Dissecting BFT Consensus: In Trusted Components we Trust!
This work addresses the problem of improving Byzantine Fault-Tolerant consensus efficiency for reliable multi-party applications, representing a strong specific gain rather than a foundational advancement.
The paper tackled the limitations of existing Trust-BFT consensus protocols by analyzing their design flaws and introducing FlexiTrust, a novel suite that achieves up to 185% more throughput than previous Trust-BFT protocols.
The growing interest in reliable multi-party applications has fostered widespread adoption of Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols. Existing BFT protocols need f more replicas than Paxos-style protocols to prevent equivocation attacks. Trust-BFT protocols instead seek to minimize this cost by making use of trusted components at replicas. This paper makes two contributions. First, we analyze the design of existing Trust-BFT protocols and uncover three fundamental limitations that preclude most practical deployments. Some of these limitations are fundamental, while others are linked to the state of trusted components today. Second, we introduce a novel suite of consensus protocols, FlexiTrust, that attempts to sidestep these issues. We show that our FlexiTrust protocols achieve up to 185% more throughput than their Trust-BFT counterparts.