Blockchain Consensus Protocols in the Wild

By Christian Cachin, Marko Vukolic. International Symposium on Distributed Computing, 2017

667 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A blockchain is a distributed ledger for recording transactions, maintained by many nodes without central authority through a distributed cryptographic protocol. All nodes validate the information to be appended to the blockchain, and a consensus protocol ensures that the nodes agree on a unique order in which entries are appended. Consensus protocols for tolerating Byzantine faults have received renewed attention because they also address blockchain systems. This work discusses the process of assessing and gaining confidence in the resilience of a consensus protocols exposed to faults and adversarial nodes. We advocate to follow the established practice in cryptography and computer security, relying on public reviews, detailed models, and formal proofs; the designers of several practical systems appear to be unaware of this. Moreover, we review the consensus protocols in some prominent permissioned blockchain platforms with respect to their fault models and resilience against attacks. The protocol comparison covers Hyperledger Fabric, Tendermint, Symbiont, R3~Corda, Iroha, Kadena, Chain, Quorum, MultiChain, Sawtooth Lake, Ripple, Stellar, and IOTA.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/26a286e447cd78227eddc801a5d9816e0215834b

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Citations in the corpus

A Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Ordering Service for the Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain Platform (2017, methodology): “in the last years try to avoid these limitations by employing more traditional Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols (e.g., [10]) for establishing consensus on the blocks in a blockchain [8]. Hyperledger Fabric1 (HLF) is a platform that target business applications. It is built with ﬂex”
SBFT: A Scalable and Decentralized Trust Infrastructure (2018, background): “In addition, large scale BFT de-ployments are becoming an important component of public blockchains [26].”
A Survey of Distributed Consensus Protocols for Blockchain Networks (2019, background): “[19] gives an overview of thirteen prominent consensus protocols designed for permissioned blockchain platforms along with their fault tolerance and security properties.”
Applications of Blockchains in the Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey (2019, background): “In [54], the author present an exhaustive study of these algorithms.”
A Vademecum on Blockchain Technologies: When, Which, and How (2019, background): “These properties are analyzed in [29] for atomic broadcasts characterized by a broadcast and a deliver event.”
A Comprehensive Review of Blockchain Consensus Mechanisms (2021, background): “Implementing this approach, normal operations maintain low overhead since the proposed blocks are presented with the quorum of signatures on the block of the recent height [127], [221]–[223].”
Integrated digital twin and blockchain framework to support accountable information sharing in construction projects (2021, background): “This mechanism excludes the possibility of other nodes sharing incorrect block information by excluding nodes with modified blocks from the consensus mechanism [50].”
Hyperledger fabric: a distributed operating system for permissioned blockchains (2018, methodology): “, Quorum [19], Chain Core [12], Multichain (https://www.multichain.com/), Hyperledger Sawtooth (https://sawtooth.hyperledger.org), the Volt proposal [32], and more, see references in recent overviews [9, 16]). All platforms follow the order-execute architecture, as discussed in Section 2. As a repre”
A Scalable Multi-Layer PBFT Consensus for Blockchain (2020, methodology): “Variant consensus algorithms have been designed for permis-sioned blockchain to provide safety under trustless environment with different performances [26].”
SoK: Consensus in the Age of Blockchains (2017, background): “(1) The distributed systems community is focussed on classical consensus protocols, where the literature is vast and complex, and needs additional effort to be tailoured to blockchains [22, 85, 93].”
A Survey on Blockchain Interoperability: Past, Present, and Future Trends (2020, background): “Nodes are not trusted individually to maintain the distributed ledger; they are trusted as a group, due to their number and diversity [39].”