Tolerating Disasters with Hierarchical Consensus

[en] Geo-replication provides disaster recovery after catastrophic accidental failures or attacks, such as fires, blackouts or denial-of-service attacks to a data center or region. Naturally distributed data structures, such as Blockchains, when well designed, are immune against such disruptions, but they also benefit from leveraging locality. In this work, we consolidate the performance of geo-replicated consensus by leveraging novel insights about hierarchical consensus and a construction methodology that allows creating novel protocols from existing building blocks. In particular we show that cluster confirmation, paired with subgroup rotation, allows protocols to safely operate through situations where all members of the global consensus group are Byzantine. We demonstrate our compositional construction by combining the recent HotStuff and Damysus protocols into a hierarchical geo-replicated blockchain with global durability guarantees. We present a compositionality proof and demonstrate the correctness of our protocol, including its ability to tolerate cluster crashes. Our protocol achieves a 20\% higher throughput than GeoBFT, the latest hierarchical Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) protocol.

Disciplines :

Computer science

Author, co-author :

YAHYAOUI, Wassim ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > CritiX

Joachim Bruneau-Queyreix; CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique [FR] > LaBRI - Univ. Bordeaux - Bordeaux INP

VÖLP, Marcus ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > CritiX

Jérémie Decouchant; Delft University of Technology

External co-authors :

yes

Language :

English

Title :

Tolerating Disasters with Hierarchical Consensus

Publication date :

20 May 2024

Event name :

IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications

Event organizer :

IEEE

Event place :

Vancouver, Canada

Event date :

20–23 May 2024

Audience :

International

Main work title :

Tolerating Disasters with Hierarchical Consensus

Publisher :

IEEE, Vancouver, Canada

Pages :

Peer reviewed :

Peer reviewed

FnR Project :

FNR/FCT grant C18/IS/12694392 (ThreatAdapt)

Available on ORBilu :

since 15 January 2024

Statistics

Number of views

188 (26 by Unilu)

Number of downloads

7 (2 by Unilu)

More statistics

Scopus citations^®

Scopus citations^®
without self-citations

OpenAlex citations

Bibliography

C. Berger, S. Schwarz-Rüsch, A. Vogel, K. Bleeke, L. Jehl, H. P. Reiser, and R. Kapitza, "Sok: Scalability techniques for BFT consensus, " arXiv preprint arXiv: 2303. 11045, 2023.
Y. Amir, C. Danilov, D. Dolev, J. Kirsch, J. Lane, C. Nita-Rotaru, J. Olsen, and D. Zage, "Steward: Scaling byzantine fault-tolerant replication to wide area networks, " IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 80-93, 2008.
Q. T. Thai, J.-C. Yim, T.-W. Yoo, H.-K. Yoo, J.-Y. Kwak, and S.-M. Kim, "Hierarchical byzantine fault-tolerance protocol for permissioned blockchain systems, " The Journal of Supercomputing, vol. 75, no. 11, pp. 7337-7365, 2019.
S. Gupta, S. Rahnama, J. Hellings, and M. Sadoghi, "Resilientdb: Global scale resilient blockchain fabric, " Proc. VLDB Endow., vol. 13, no. 6, pp. 868-883, 2020.
W. Jiang, X. Wu, M. Song, J. Qin, and Z. Jia, "A scalable byzantine fault tolerance algorithm based on a tree topology network, " IEEE Access, 2023.
L. Zhang and Q. Li, "Research on consensus efficiency based on practical byzantine fault tolerance, " in 2018 10th international conference on modelling, identification and control (ICMIC). IEEE, 2018, pp. 1-6.
L. Feng, H. Zhang, Y. Chen, and L. Lou, "Scalable dynamic multi-agent practical byzantine fault-tolerant consensus in permissioned blockchain, " Applied Sciences, vol. 8, no. 10, p. 1919, 2018.
H. Qushtom, J. Misíc, V. B. Misíc, and X. Chang, "A high performance two-layer consensus architecture for blockchain-based IoT systems, " Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications, pp. 1-13, 2022.
Y. Li, L. Qiao, and Z. Lv, "An optimized byzantine fault tolerance algorithm for consortium blockchain, " Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications, vol. 14, pp. 2826-2839, 2021.
G. S. Veronese, M. Correia, A. N. Bessani, L. C. Lung, and P. Verissimo, "Efficient byzantine fault-tolerance, " IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 62, no. 1, pp. 16-30, 2011.
J. Decouchant, D. Kozhaya, V. Rahli, and J. Yu, "DAMYSUS: streamlined BFT consensus leveraging trusted components, " in Proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Computer Systems, 2022, pp. 1-16.
S. Gupta, S. Rahnama, S. Pandey, N. Crooks, and M. Sadoghi, "Dissecting bft consensus: In trusted components we trust!" in Proceedings of the 18th European Conference on Computer Systems, ser. EuroSys '23, New York, NY, USA, 2023, p. 521-539.
A. Bessani, M. Correia, T. Distler, R. Kapitza, P. Esteves-Verissimo, and J. Yu, "Vivisecting the dissection: On the role of trusted components in bft protocols, " 2023.
M. Yin, D. Malkhi, M. K. Reiter, G. G. Gueta, and I. Abraham, "Hot-Stuff: BFT consensus with linearity and responsiveness, " in Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, 2019, pp. 347-356.
M. Castro and B. Liskov, "Practical byzantine fault tolerance and proactive recovery, " ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 398-461, 2002.
A. Bessani, J. Sousa, and E. E. Alchieri, "State machine replication for the masses with BFT-smart, " in 2014 44th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks. IEEE, 2014, pp. 355-362.
R. Kotla, L. Alvisi, M. Dahlin, A. Clement, and E. Wong, "Zyzzyva: speculative byzantine fault tolerance, " in Proceedings of twenty-first ACM SIGOPS symposium on Operating systems principles, 2007, pp. 45-58.
A. Haeberlen, P. Kouznetsov, and P. Druschel, "Peerreview: Practical accountability for distributed systems, " ACM SIGOPS operating systems review, vol. 41, no. 6, pp. 175-188, 2007.
B. Chun, P. Maniatis, S. Shenker, and J. Kubiatowicz, "Attested appendonly memory: making adversaries stick to their word, " 2007, pp. 189-204.
D. Levin, J. R. Douceur, J. R. Lorch, and T. Moscibroda, "TrInc: Small trusted hardware for large distributed systems, " 2009, pp. 1-14.
X. Xu, D. Zhu, X. Yang, S. Wang, L. Qi, and W. Dou, "Concurrent practical byzantine fault tolerance for integration of blockchain and supply" IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 1154-1166, 2020.
L.-e. Wang, Y. Bai, Q. Jiang, V. C. Leung, W. Cai, and X. Li, "Beh-raftchain: A behavior-based fast blockchain protocol for complex networks, " chain, " ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT), vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 1-17, 2021.
F. Wen, L. Yang, W. Cai, and P. Zhou, "Dp-hybrid: A two-layer consensus protocol for high scalability in permissioned blockchain, " in Blockchain and Trustworthy Systems: Second International Conference, BlockSys 2020, Dali, China, August 6-7, 2020, Revised Selected Papers 2. Springer, 2020, pp. 57-71.
W. Li, C. Feng, L. Zhang, H. Xu, B. Cao, and M. A. Imran, "A scalable multi-layer PBFT consensus for blockchain, " IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, vol. 32, no. 5, pp. 1146-1160, 2020.
M. Javad Amiri, Z. Lai, L. Patel, B. Thau Loo, E. Lo, and W. Zhou, "Saguaro: Efficient processing of transactions in wide area networks using a hierarchical permissioned blockchain, " arXiv e-prints, pp. arXiv-2101, 2021.
G. Danezis, L. Kokoris-Kogias, A. Sonnino, and A. Spiegelman, "Narwhal and tusk: A dag-based mempool and efficient BFT consensus, " in Proceedings of the Seventeenth European Conference on Computer Systems, 2022, pp. 34-50.
A. Spiegelman, N. Giridharan, A. Sonnino, and L. Kokoris-Kogias, "Bullshark: Dag BFT protocols made practical, " in Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2022, pp. 2705-2718.
L. Baird, "The swirlds hashgraph consensus algorithm: Fair, fast, byzantine fault tolerance, " Swirlds Tech Reports SWIRLDS-TR-2016-01, Tech. Rep, vol. 34, 2016.
A. Gagol, D. Lesniak, D. Straszak, and M. Swietek, "Aleph: Efficient atomic broadcast in asynchronous networks with byzantine nodes, " in Proceedings of the 1st ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies, 2019, pp. 214-228.
Y. Sompolinsky and A. Zohar, "Secure high-rate transaction processing in bitcoin, " in International conference on financial cryptography and data security. Springer, 2015, pp. 507-527.
A. Miller, Y. Xia, K. Croman, E. Shi, and D. Song, "The honey badger of BFT protocols, " in Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC conference on computer and communications security, 2016, pp. 31-42.
T. Crain, C. Natoli, and V. Gramoli, "Red belly: A secure, fair and scalable open blockchain, " in 2021 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP). IEEE, 2021, pp. 466-483.
C. Stathakopoulou, T. David, and M. Vukolic, "Mir-BFT: Highthroughput BFT for blockchains, " arXiv preprint arXiv: 1906. 05552, 2019.
K. Korkmaz, J. Bruneau-Queyreix, S. B. Mokhtar, and L. Réveillère, "Alder: Unlocking blockchain performance by multiplexing consensus protocols, " in 2022 IEEE 21st International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (NCA), vol. 21. IEEE, 2022, pp. 9-18.
Y. Gilad, R. Hemo, S. Micali, G. Vlachos, and N. Zeldovich, "Algorand: Scaling byzantine agreements for cryptocurrencies, " in Proceedings of the 26th symposium on operating systems principles, 2017, pp. 51-68.
L. Luu, V. Narayanan, C. Zheng, K. Baweja, S. Gilbert, and P. Saxena, "A secure sharding protocol for open blockchains, " in Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC conference on computer and communications security, 2016, pp. 17-30.
M. Zamani, M. Movahedi, and M. Raykova, "Rapidchain: Scaling blockchain via full sharding, " in CCS, 2018.
C. Dwork, N. Lynch, and L. Stockmeyer, "Consensus in the presence of partial synchrony, " Journal of the ACM (JACM), vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 288-323, 1988.
G. Bracha, "Asynchronous byzantine agreement protocols, " Information and Computation, vol. 75, no. 2, pp. 130-143, 1987.
S. Bonomi, J. Decouchant, G. Farina, V. Rahli, and S. Tixeuil, "Practical byzantine reliable broadcast on partially connected networks, " in 2021 IEEE 41st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS). IEEE, 2021, pp. 506-516.
A. Shamir, "How to share a secret, " Communications of the ACM, vol. 22, no. 11, pp. 612-613, 1979.
R. Vassantlal, E. Alchieri, B. Ferreira, and A. Bessani, "Cobra: Dynamic proactive secret sharing for confidential BFT services, " in 2022 IEEE symposium on security and privacy (SP). IEEE, 2022, pp. 1335-1353.