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International Workshop on Data Privacy Management

International Workshop on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology

DPM 2021, CBT 2021: Data Privacy Management, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology pp 192–207Cite as

Asymmetric Asynchronous Byzantine Consensus

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Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNSC,volume 13140)

Abstract

An important element of every blockchain network is its protocol for reaching consensus. In traditional, permissioned consensus protocols, all involved processes adhere to a global, symmetric failure model, typically only defined by bounds on the number of faulty processes. More flexible trust assumptions have recently been considered, especially in connection with blockchains. With asymmetric trust, in particular, a process is free to choose which other processes it trusts and which ones might collude against it.

Cachin and Tackmann (OPODIS 2019) introduced asymmetric quorum systems as a generalization of Byzantine quorum systems, which are the key abstraction for realizing consensus in a system with symmetric trust. This paper shows how to realize randomized signature-free asynchronous Byzantine consensus with asymmetric quorums. This results in an optimal consensus protocol with subjective, asymmetric trust and constant expected running time, which is suitable for applications in blockchain networks.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Compared to their work, we adjusted some conditions to standard terminology and chose to call the primitive “binary validated broadcast” to better emphasize its aspect of validating that a delivered value was broadcast by a correct process.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Orestis Alpos, Vincent Gramoli, Giorgia Azzurra Marson, Achour Mostéfaoui, and anonymous reviewers for interesting discussions and helpful feedback.

This work has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) under grant agreement Nr. 200021_188443 (Advanced Consensus Protocols).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer Science, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Christian Cachin & Luca Zanolini

Authors
  1. Christian Cachin
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  2. Luca Zanolini
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Christian Cachin or Luca Zanolini .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Palaiseau, France

    Prof. Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro

  2. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

    Jose Luis Muñoz-Tapia

  3. Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain

    Guillermo Navarro-Arribas

  4. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

    Miguel Soriano

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Cachin, C., Zanolini, L. (2022). Asymmetric Asynchronous Byzantine Consensus. In: Garcia-Alfaro, J., Muñoz-Tapia, J.L., Navarro-Arribas, G., Soriano, M. (eds) Data Privacy Management, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology. DPM CBT 2021 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13140. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93944-1_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93944-1_13

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