An Extensible Framework for Implementing Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Protocols

Abstract

HotStuff is a Byzantine fault-tolerant state machine replication protocol that incurs linear communication costs to achieve consensus. This linear scalability promoted the protocol to be adopted as the consensus mechanism in permissioned blockchains. This paper discusses the architecture and evaluation of our extensible framework to implement three HotStuff variants. This reimplementation demonstrates the extensibility of our framework to implement other HotStuff-like protocols. Leveraging our deployment tool, we evaluated our implementation on a wide variety of configurations.