The availability-accountability dilemma and its resolution via accountability gadgets

DOI10.1007/978-3-031-18283-9_27zbMATH Open1515.91174arXiv2105.06075OpenAlexW3163044492MaRDI QIDQ6045232FDOQ6045232

Authors: Joachim Neu, Ertem Nusret Tas, David N. C. Tse 

Publication date: 26 May 2023

Published in: Financial Cryptography and Data Security (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: For applications of Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols where the participants are economic agents, recent works highlighted the importance of accountability: the ability to identify participants who provably violate the protocol. At the same time, being able to reach consensus under dynamic levels of participation is desirable for censorship resistance. We identify an availability-accountability dilemma: in an environment with dynamic participation, no protocol can simultaneously be accountably-safe and live. We provide a resolution to this dilemma by constructing a provably secure optimally-resilient accountability gadget to checkpoint a longest chain protocol, such that the full ledger is live under dynamic participation and the checkpointed prefix ledger is accountable. Our accountability gadget construction is black-box and can use any BFT protocol which is accountable under static participation. Using HotStuff as the black box, we implemented our construction as a protocol for the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain, and our Internet-scale experiments with more than 4000 nodes show that the protocol achieves the required scalability and has better latency than the current solution Gasper, which was shown insecure by recent attacks.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.06075

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Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Cryptography (94A60) Actuarial science and mathematical finance (91G99)

Cites Work

• The Bitcoin Backbone Protocol: Analysis and Applications
• The sleepy model of consensus
• Ouroboros Praos: an adaptively-secure, semi-synchronous proof-of-stake blockchain
• Ouroboros: a provably secure proof-of-stake blockchain protocol
• Algorand: a secure and efficient distributed ledger
• HotStuff
• Synchronous, with a chance of partition tolerance
• Afgjort: a partially synchronous finality layer for blockchains
• Blockchain CAP theorem allows user-dependent adaptivity and finality

Cited In (1)

• Automated analysis of accountability

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