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European Symposium on Research in Computer Security

ESORICS 2020: Computer Security – ESORICS 2020 pp 133–152Cite as

Anonymity Preserving Byzantine Vector Consensus

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNSC,volume 12308)

Abstract

Collecting anonymous opinions has applications from whistleblowing to complex voting where participants rank candidates by order of preferences. Unfortunately, as far as we know there is no efficient distributed solution to this problem. Previous solutions either require trusted third parties, are inefficient or sacrifice anonymity.

In this paper, we propose a distributed solution called the Anonymised Vector Consensus Protocol (AVCP) that reduces the problem of agreeing on a set of anonymous votes to the binary Byzantine consensus problem. The key idea to preserve the anonymity of voters—despite some of them acting maliciously—is to detect double votes through traceable ring signatures. AVCP is resilient-optimal as it tolerates up to a third of Byzantine participants. We show that our algorithm is correct and that it preserves anonymity with at most a linear communication overhead and constant message overhead when compared to a recent consensus baseline. Finally, we demonstrate empirically that the protocol is practical by deploying it on 100 machines geo-distributed in three continents: America, Asia and Europe. Anonymous decisions are reached within 10 s with a conservative choice of traceable ring signatures.

Keywords

  • Anonymity
  • Byzantine agreement
  • Consensus
  • Vector consensus
  • Distributed computing

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Fig. 1.

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://docs.python.org/2/library/ctypes.html.

  2. 2.

    https://metrics.torproject.org/.

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Acknowledgment

This research is supported under Australian Research Council Discovery Projects funding scheme (project number 180104030) entitled “Taipan: A Blockchain with Democratic Consensus and Validated Contracts” and Australian Research Council Future Fellowship funding scheme (project number 180100496) entitled “The Red Belly Blockchain: A Scalable Blockchain for Internet of Things”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Christian Cachin

  2. University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Daniel Collins, Tyler Crain & Vincent Gramoli

  3. EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Daniel Collins & Vincent Gramoli

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  1. Christian Cachin
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  2. Daniel Collins
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  4. Vincent Gramoli
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Correspondence to Daniel Collins .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

    Prof. Liqun Chen

  2. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Prof. Ninghui Li

  3. Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Kaitai Liang

  4. University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

    Prof. Steve Schneider

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Cachin, C., Collins, D., Crain, T., Gramoli, V. (2020). Anonymity Preserving Byzantine Vector Consensus. In: Chen, L., Li, N., Liang, K., Schneider, S. (eds) Computer Security – ESORICS 2020. ESORICS 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12308. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58951-6_7

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