Towards Cost-Effective and Robust Packaging in Multi-Leader BFT Blockchain Systems

Abstract

In Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) systems, maintaining consistency amidst malicious replicas is crucial, especially for blockchain systems. Recent innovations in this field have integrated multiple leaders into the BFT consensus mechanism to boost scalability and efficiency. However, the existing approaches often lead to excessive consumption of storage, bandwidth, and CPU resources due to redundant transactions. And the attempting to mitigate resource wastage inadvertently reduces resilience against Byzantine failures. To this end, we propose PeterHofe, an innovative ring-based approach for collaborative transaction processing. PeterHofe focuses on balancing resource utilization and minimizing the influence of Byzantine leaders, thereby enhancing transaction processing speed and overall system reliability. PeterHofe innovates by partitioning the transaction hash space into various buckets and creating a complex mappings between these buckets and the replicas, effectively reducing the control of Byzantine replicas. In developing PeterHofe, we concentrate on three primary objectives: 1) the creation of a permutation-based ring structure that enhances resistance to Byzantine censorship, backed by thorough mathematical proofs and analyses; 2) the development of a Prophecy-Implementation mechanism aimed at minimizing transaction replication while scrutinizing potential malicious activities; 3) to ensure the applicability of our proposed method across various types of multi-leader BFT consensus protocols, we have developed an additional asynchronous protocol to ensure consistent application of the packaging strategy. We have implemented PeterHofe using the latest significant frameworks, Narwhal and Tusk, and our empirical results affirm its capability to simultaneously minimize resource waste and bolster system robustness. Specifically, PeterHofe demonstrates efficiency in resource utilization, achieving a 20-fold reduction of resource waste when compared to the Random-based Strategy. When against the advanced Hash-based Partitioning Strategy, it reduces malicious transaction control by at least 66 $\%$ , leading to up to 75 $\%$ lower latency. In scenarios of high traffic, our approach significantly outperforms existing strategies in throughput. Against the Random-based Strategy, it achieves a 6.11 $\%$ increase, and when compared to the Hash-based Partitioning Strategy, the improvement is 20 $\%$ .