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Jolteon and Ditto: Network-Adaptive Efficient Consensus with Asynchronous Fallback

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13411))

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Abstract

Existing committee-based Byzantine state machine replication (SMR) protocols, typically deployed in production blockchains, face a clear trade-off: (1) they either achieve linear communication cost in the steady state, but sacrifice liveness during periods of asynchrony, or (2) they are robust (progress with probability one) but pay quadratic communication cost. We believe this trade-off is unwarranted since existing linear protocols still have asymptotic quadratic cost in the worst case. We design Ditto, a Byzantine SMR protocol that enjoys the best of both worlds: optimal communication on and off the steady state (linear and quadratic, respectively) and progress guarantee under asynchrony and DDoS attacks. We achieve this by replacing the view-synchronization of partially synchronous protocols with an asynchronous fallback mechanism at no extra asymptotic cost. Specifically, we start from HotStuff, a state-of-the-art linear protocol, and gradually build Ditto. As a separate contribution and an intermediate step, we design a 2-chain version of HotStuff, Jolteon, which leverages a quadratic view-change mechanism to reduce the latency of the standard 3-chain HotStuff. We implement and experimentally evaluate all our systems to prove that breaking the robustness-efficiency trade-off is in the realm of practicality.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For example, clients can send their transactions to all replicas, and the leader can propose transactions that are not yet included in the blockchain, in the order that they are submitted. With rotating leaders of HotStuff/DiemBFT and random leader election of the asynchronous fallback, the assumption can be guaranteed.

  2. 2.

    The implementation of DiemBFT does not use threshold signatures, but for the theoretical comparison here we consider a version of DiemBFT that does.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/asonnino/hotstuff/tree/3-chain.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/hot-stuff/libhotstuff.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/asonnino/hotstuff/tree/async.

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Acknowledgments

We thank our shepherd Aniket Kate and the anonymous reviewers at FC 2022 for their helpful feedback. This work is supported by the Novi team at Facebook. We also thank the Novi Research and Engineering teams for valuable feedback, and in particular Mathieu Baudet, Andrey Chursin, George Danezis, Zekun Li, and Dahlia Malkhi for discussions that shaped this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Novi Research, Novi, USA

    Rati Gelashvili, Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias, Alberto Sonnino, Alexander Spiegelman & Zhuolun Xiang

  2. IST Austria, Klosterneuburg, Austria

    Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias

  3. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, USA

    Zhuolun Xiang

Authors
  1. Rati Gelashvili
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  2. Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias
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  3. Alberto Sonnino
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  4. Alexander Spiegelman
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  5. Zhuolun Xiang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zhuolun Xiang .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

    Ittay Eyal

  2. Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Juan Garay

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Gelashvili, R., Kokoris-Kogias, L., Sonnino, A., Spiegelman, A., Xiang, Z. (2022). Jolteon and Ditto: Network-Adaptive Efficient Consensus with Asynchronous Fallback. In: Eyal, I., Garay, J. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13411. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18283-9_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18283-9_14

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