IACR News item: 24 February 2016
Andrew Miller, Yu Xia, Elaine Shi, Dawn Song
ePrint Report
The surprising success of cryptocurrencies has
led to a surge of interest in deploying large scale,
highly robust, Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) proto-
cols for mission-critical applications, such as finan-
cial transactions. Although the conventional wisdom
is to build atop a (weakly) synchronous protocol such
as PBFT (or a variation thereof), such protocols rely
critically on network timing assumptions, and only
guarantee liveness when the network behaves as ex-
pected. We argue these protocols are ill-suited for this
deployment scenario.
We present an alternative, HoneyBadgerBFT, the first practical asynchronous BFT protocol, which guarantees liveness without making any timing as- sumptions. We base our solution on a novel atomic broadcast protocol that achieves optimal asymptotic efficiency. We present an implementation and ex- perimental results to show our system can achieve throughput of tens of thousands of transactions per second, and scales to over a hundred nodes on a wide area network. We even conduct BFT experi- ments over Tor, without needing to tune any parame- ters. Unlike the alternatives, HoneyBadgerBFT sim- ply does not care about the underlying network.
We present an alternative, HoneyBadgerBFT, the first practical asynchronous BFT protocol, which guarantees liveness without making any timing as- sumptions. We base our solution on a novel atomic broadcast protocol that achieves optimal asymptotic efficiency. We present an implementation and ex- perimental results to show our system can achieve throughput of tens of thousands of transactions per second, and scales to over a hundred nodes on a wide area network. We even conduct BFT experi- ments over Tor, without needing to tune any parame- ters. Unlike the alternatives, HoneyBadgerBFT sim- ply does not care about the underlying network.
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