Brief Announcement: Communication-Efficient BFT Using Small Trusted Hardware to Tolerate Minority Corruption

Abstract

Small trusted hardware primitives can improve fault tolerance of Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocols to one-half faults. However, existing works achieve this at the cost of increased communication complexity. In this work, we explore the design of communication-efficient BFT protocols that can boost fault tolerance to one-half without worsening communication complexity. Our results include a version of HotStuff that retains linear communication complexity in each view and a version of the VABA protocol with quadratic communication, both leveraging trusted hardware to tolerate a minority of corruptions. As a building block, we present communication-efficient provable broadcast, a core broadcast primitive with increased fault tolerance. Our results use expander graphs to achieve efficient communication in a manner that may be of independent interest.