TetraBFT: Reducing Latency of Unauthenticated, Responsive BFT Consensus
For blockchain systems requiring high efficiency, TetraBFT offers a practical unauthenticated BFT protocol with lower latency than existing solutions.
TetraBFT reduces consensus latency to 5 message delays in unauthenticated BFT, outperforming prior protocols while maintaining optimal communication complexity and constant storage.
This paper presents TetraBFT, a novel unauthenticated Byzantine fault tolerant protocol for solving consensus in partial synchrony, eliminating the need for public key cryptography and ensuring resilience against computationally unbounded adversaries. TetraBFT has several compelling features: it necessitates only constant local storage, has optimal communication complexity, satisfies optimistic responsiveness -- allowing the protocol to operate at actual network speeds under ideal conditions -- and can achieve consensus in just 5 message delays, which outperforms all known unauthenticated protocols achieving the other properties listed. We validate the correctness of TetraBFT through rigorous security analysis and formal verification. Furthermore, we extend TetraBFT into a multi-shot, chained consensus protocol, making a pioneering effort in applying pipelining techniques to unauthenticated protocols. This positions TetraBFT as a practical and deployable solution for blockchain systems aiming for high efficiency.