Computer hardware

Byzantine fault tolerance

Computer security

Classics

Operating system

Telecommunications

Blockchain

Scalability

Computer science

Protocol (science)

Distributed computing

Computer network

Alternative medicine

Latency (audio)

Fault tolerance

Byzantine architecture

Cryptography

Medicine

Secret sharing

Pathology

IEEE Transactions on Computers

The surging interest in blockchain technology has revitalized the search for effective Byzantine consensus schemes. In particular, the blockchain community has been looking for ways to effectively integrate traditional Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols into a blockchain consensus layer allowing various financial institutions to securely agree on the order of transactions. However, existing BFT protocols can only scale to tens of nodes due to their <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(n^2)$</tex-math></inline-formula> message complexity. In this paper, we propose FastBFT, a fast and scalable BFT protocol. At the heart of FastBFT is a novel message aggregation technique that combines hardware-based trusted execution environments (TEEs) with lightweight secret sharing. Combining this technique with several other optimizations (i.e., optimistic execution, tree topology and failure detection), FastBFT achieves low latency and high throughput even for large scale networks. Via systematic analysis and experiments, we demonstrate that FastBFT has better scalability and performance than previous BFT protocols.

Scalable Byzantine Consensus via Hardware-Assisted Secret Sharing