ReCon: Sybil-Resistant Consensus from Reputation

In this paper we describe how to couple reputation systems with distributed consensus protocols to provide a scalable permissionless consensus protocol with a low barrier of entry, while still providing strong resistance against Sybil attacks for large peer-to-peer networks of untrusted validators.

We introduce reputation module ReCon, which can be laid on top of various consensus protocols such as PBFT or HoneyBadger. The protocol takes external reputation ranking as input and then ranks nodes based on the outcomes of consensus rounds run by a small committee, and adaptively selects the committee based on the current reputation. ReCon can tolerate larger threshold of malicious nodes (up to slightly above 1/2) compared to the 1/3 limit of BFT consensus algorithms.