TY - GEN
T1 - Consensus through herding
AU - Hubert Chan, T. H.
AU - Pass, Rafael
AU - Shi, Elaine
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© International Association for Cryptologic Research 2019.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - State Machine Replication (SMR) is an important abstraction for a set of nodes to agree on an ever-growing, linearly-ordered log of transactions. In decentralized cryptocurrency applications, we would like to design SMR protocols that (1) resist adaptive corruptions; and (2) achieve small bandwidth and small confirmation time. All past approaches towards constructing SMR fail to achieve either small confirmation time or small bandwidth under adaptive corruptions (without resorting to strong assumptions such as the erasure model or proof-of-work). We propose a novel paradigm for reaching consensus that departs significantly from classical approaches. Our protocol is inspired by a social phenomenon called herding, where people tend to make choices considered as the social norm. In our consensus protocol, leader election and voting are coalesced into a single (randomized) process: in every round, every node tries to cast a vote for what it views as the most popular item so far: such a voting attempt is not always successful, but rather, successful with a certain probability. Importantly, the probability that the node is elected to vote for v is independent from the probability it is elected to vote for v′≠ v. We will show how to realize such a distributed, randomized election process using appropriate, adaptively secure cryptographic building blocks. We show that amazingly, not only can this new paradigm achieve consensus (e.g., on a batch of unconfirmed transactions in a cryptocurrency system), but it also allows us to derive the first SMR protocol which, even under adaptive corruptions, requires only polylogarithmically many rounds and polylogarithmically many honest messages to be multicast to confirm each batch of transactions; and importantly, we attain these guarantees under standard cryptographic assumptions.
AB - State Machine Replication (SMR) is an important abstraction for a set of nodes to agree on an ever-growing, linearly-ordered log of transactions. In decentralized cryptocurrency applications, we would like to design SMR protocols that (1) resist adaptive corruptions; and (2) achieve small bandwidth and small confirmation time. All past approaches towards constructing SMR fail to achieve either small confirmation time or small bandwidth under adaptive corruptions (without resorting to strong assumptions such as the erasure model or proof-of-work). We propose a novel paradigm for reaching consensus that departs significantly from classical approaches. Our protocol is inspired by a social phenomenon called herding, where people tend to make choices considered as the social norm. In our consensus protocol, leader election and voting are coalesced into a single (randomized) process: in every round, every node tries to cast a vote for what it views as the most popular item so far: such a voting attempt is not always successful, but rather, successful with a certain probability. Importantly, the probability that the node is elected to vote for v is independent from the probability it is elected to vote for v′≠ v. We will show how to realize such a distributed, randomized election process using appropriate, adaptively secure cryptographic building blocks. We show that amazingly, not only can this new paradigm achieve consensus (e.g., on a batch of unconfirmed transactions in a cryptocurrency system), but it also allows us to derive the first SMR protocol which, even under adaptive corruptions, requires only polylogarithmically many rounds and polylogarithmically many honest messages to be multicast to confirm each batch of transactions; and importantly, we attain these guarantees under standard cryptographic assumptions.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85065905363&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-17653-2_24
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-17653-2_24
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AN - SCOPUS:85065905363
SN - 9783030176525
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 720
EP - 749
BT - Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2019 - 38th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques, Proceedings
A2 - Ishai, Yuval
A2 - Rijmen, Vincent
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 38th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques, Eurocrypt 2019
Y2 - 19 May 2019 through 23 May 2019
ER -