The availability-accountability dilemma and its resolution via accountability gadgets

DOI10.1007/978-3-031-18283-9_27MaRDI QIDQ6045232zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

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)

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

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

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

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.

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Cites work

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

Cited in

(3)

• Cryptoeconomic security for data availability committees
• Player-replaceability and forensic support are two sides of the same (crypto) coin
• Automated analysis of accountability

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