survey

A Survey of Blockchain Consensus Protocols

Authors:

Xiaohua JiaAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Computing Surveys, Volume 55, Issue 13s

Article No.: 278, Pages 1 - 35

https://doi.org/10.1145/3579845

Published: 13 July 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Blockchain consensus protocols have been a focus of attention since the advent of Bitcoin. Although classic distributed consensus algorithms made significant contributions to the development of blockchain consensus protocols, there are still many issues to be resolved due to the complexity and diversity of the blockchain. In this survey, we summarize the state-of-the-art blockchain consensus protocols. We first introduce the theoretical basis, models, and challenges of blockchain consensus protocols. Then, we present the existing blockchain protocols in the categories of proof-based protocols, committee-based protocols, and other miscellaneous protocols. Finally, we analyze their performance and discuss future research directions by comparing existing protocols.

References

[1]

Ittai Abraham, Dahlia Malkhi, Kartik Nayak, Ling Ren, and Alexander Spiegelman. 2017. Solida: A Blockchain Protocol Based on Reconfigurable Byzantine Consensus. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2017/1118. Retrieved from https://ia.cr/2017/1118.

[2]

Ittai Abraham, Dahlia Malkhi, Kartik Nayak, Ling Ren, and Maofan Yin. 2020. Sync hotstuff: Simple and practical synchronous state machine replication. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP’20). IEEE, 106–118. DOI:

[3]

Ittai Abraham, Dahlia Malkhi, and Alexander Spiegelman. 2019. Asymptotically optimal validated asynchronous byzantine agreement. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC’19). ACM, New York, NY, 337–346. DOI:

Digital Library

[4]

Elli Androulaki, Artem Barger, Vita Bortnikov, Christian Cachin, Konstantinos Christidis, Angelo De Caro, David Enyeart, Christopher Ferris, Gennady Laventman, Yacov Manevich, Srinivasan Muralidharan, Chet Murthy, Binh Nguyen, Manish Sethi, Gari Singh, Keith Smith, Alessandro Sorniotti, Chrysoula Stathakopoulou, Marko Vukolić, Sharon Weed Cocco, and Jason Yellick. 2018. Hyperledger fabric: A distributed operating system for permissioned blockchains. In Proceedings of the 13th EuroSys Conference (EuroSys’18). ACM, New York, NY, Article 30, 15 pages. DOI:

Digital Library

[5]

Giuseppe Ateniese, Randal Burns, Reza Curtmola, Joseph Herring, Lea Kissner, Zachary Peterson, and Dawn Song. 2007. Provable data possession at untrusted stores. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’07). ACM, New York, NY, 598–609. DOI:

Digital Library

[6]

Giuseppe Ateniese, Bernardo Magri, Daniele Venturi, and Ewerton Andrade. 2017. Redactable Blockchain—or—rewriting history in bitcoin and friends. In Proceedings of the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P’17). IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA, 111–126. DOI:

[7]

Azure. [n.d.]. Retrieved from https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/.

[8]

Adam Back, Matt Corallo, Luke Dashjr, Mark Friedenbach, Gregory Maxwell, Andrew Miller, Andrew Poelstra, Jorge Timón, and Pieter Wuille. 2014. Enabling Blockchain Innovations with Pegged Sidechains. Retrieved from http://www.opensciencereview.com/papers/123/enablingblockchain-innovations-with-pegged-sidechains.

[9]

Christian Badertscher, Peter Gaži, Aggelos Kiayias, Alexander Russell, and Vassilis Zikas. 2018. Ouroboros genesis: Composable proof-of-stake blockchains with dynamic availability. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’18). ACM, New York, NY, 913–930. DOI:

Digital Library

[10]

Vivek Bagaria, Sreeram Kannan, David Tse, Giulia Fanti, and Pramod Viswanath. 2019. Prism: Deconstructing the blockchain to approach physical limits. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’19). ACM, New York, NY, 585–602. DOI:

Digital Library

[11]

Leemon Baird. 2016. The Swirlds Hashgraph Consensus Algorithm: Fair, Fast, Byzantine Fault Tolerance. Retrieved from https://www.swirlds.com/downloads/SWIRLDS-TR-2016-01.pdf.

[12]

Michael Ben-Or, Boaz Kelmer, and Tal Rabin. 1994. Asynchronous secure computations with optimal resilience. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC’94). ACM, New York, NY, 183–192. DOI:

Digital Library

[13]

Juan Benet and Nicola Greco. 2017. Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network. Retrieved from https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf.

[14]

Iddo Bentov, Rafael Pass, and Elaine Shi. 2016. Snow White: Provably Secure Proofs of Stake. Retrieved from https://allquantor.at/blockchainbib/pdf/bentov2016snow.pdf.

[15]

Alex Biryukov and Dmitry Khovratovich. 2016. Equihash: Asymmetric proof-of-work based on the generalized birthday problem. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS’16). The Internet Society.

[16]

George Bissias and Brian N. Levine. 2020. Bobtail: Improved blockchain security with low-variance mining. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS’20). The Internet Society, 1–16.

[17]

Bitshares. Bitshares. [n.d.]. Retrieved from https://bitshares.org/.

[18]

Dan Boneh, Joseph Bonneau, Benedikt Bünz, and Ben Fisch. 2018. Verifiable delay functions. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual International Cryptology Conference, Vol. 10991. Springer, 757–788. DOI:

Digital Library

[19]

Dan Boneh, Benedikt Bünz, and Ben Fisch. 2018. A Survey of Two Verifiable Delay Functions. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2018/712. Retrieved from https://ia.cr/2018/712.

[20]

Joseph Bonneau, Andrew Miller, Jeremy Clark, Arvind Narayanan, Joshua A. Kroll, and Edward W. Felten. 2015. Sok: Research perspectives and challenges for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP’15). IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA, 104–121. DOI:

Digital Library

[21]

Cody Born. 2018. Ethereum Proof-of-Authority on Azure. Retrieved from https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ethereum-proof-of-authority-on-azure/.

[22]

Kevin D. Bowers, Ari Juels, and Alina Oprea. 2009. Proofs of retrievability: Theory and implementation. In Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Cloud Computing Security (CCSW’09). ACM, New York, NY, 43–54. DOI:

Digital Library

[23]

Vitalik Buterin et al. 2014. A Next-generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform. Retrieved from https://blockchainlab.com/pdf/Ethereum_white_paper-a_next_generation_smart_contract_and_decentralized_application_platform-vitalik-buterin.pdf.

[24]

Vitalik Buterin and Virgil Griffith. 2019. Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget. Retrieved from arxiv:cs.CR/1710.09437.

[25]

Christian Cachin and Marko Vukolić. 2017. Blockchain Consensus Protocols in the Wild. Retrieved from https:// arxiv:cs.DC/1707.01873.

[26]

Miguel Castro and Barbara Liskov. 1999. Practical Byzantine fault tolerance. In Proceedings of the 3rd USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI’99). USENIX Association, 173–186.

[27]

Miguel Castro and Barbara Liskov. 2002. Practical Byzantine fault tolerance and proactive recovery. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 20, 4 (2002), 398–461.

Digital Library

[28]

T.-H. Hubert Chan, Rafael Pass, and Elaine Shi. 2018. PaLa: A Simple Partially Synchronous Blockchain. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2018/981. Retrieved from https://ia.cr/2018/981.

[29]

T.-H. Hubert Chan, Rafael Pass, and Elaine Shi. 2018. PiLi: An Extremely Simple Synchronous Blockchain. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2018/980. Retrieved from https://ia.cr/2018/980.

[30]

Chia. [n.d.]. Retrieved from https://www.chia.net/.

[31]

Anton Churyumov. 2018. Byteball: A Decentralized System for Storage and Transfer of Value. Retrieved from https://byteball.org/Byteball.pdf.

[32]

Nxt community. 2016. Nxt Whitepaper. Retrieved from https://nxtdocs.jelurida.com/Nxt_Whitepaper.

[33]

Matt Corallo. 2016. Compact Block Relay. Retrieved from https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0152.mediawiki.

[34]

Hung Dang, Tien Tuan Anh Dinh, Dumitrel Loghin, Ee-Chien Chang, Qian Lin, and Beng Chin Ooi. 2019. Towards scaling blockchain systems via sharding. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD’19). ACM, New York, NY, 123–140. DOI:

Digital Library

[35]

DASH. DASH. [n.d.]. Retrieved from https://www.dash.org/.

[36]

Bernardo David, Peter Gaži, Aggelos Kiayias, and Alexander Russell. 2018. Ouroboros praos: An adaptively secure, semi-synchronous proof-of-stake blockchain. In Proceedings of the 37th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques, Vol. 10821. Springer, 66–98. DOI:

[37]

Soubhik Deb, Sreeram Kannan, and David Tse. 2021. PoSAT: Proof-of-work availability and unpredictability, without the work. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, Vol. 12675. Springer, Berlin, 104–128. DOI:

Digital Library

[38]

Amir Dembo, Sreeram Kannan, Ertem Nusret Tas, David Tse, Pramod Viswanath, Xuechao Wang, and Ofer Zeitouni. 2020. Everything is a race and nakamoto always wins. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’20). ACM, New York, NY, 859–878. DOI:

Digital Library

[39]

David Derler, Kai Samelin, Daniel Slamanig, and Christoph Striecks. 2019. Fine-grained and controlled rewriting in blockchains: Chameleon-hashing gone attribute-based. In Proceedings of the 26th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS’19). The Internet Society, 1–15.

[40]

Dominic Deuber, Bernardo Magri, and Sri Aravinda Krishnan Thyagarajan. 2019. Redactable blockchain in the permissionless setting. In Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP’19). IEEE, 124–138. DOI:

[41]

Dogecoin. [n.d.]. Retrieved from https://dogecoin.com/.

[42]

Sisi Duan, Michael K. Reiter, and Haibin Zhang. 2018. BEAT: Asynchronous BFT made practical. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’18). ACM, New York, NY, 2028–2041. DOI:

Digital Library

[43]

Evan Duffield and Daniel Diaz. 2018. Dash: A Payments-Focused Cryptocurrency. Retrieved from https://github.com/dashpay/dash/wiki/Whitepaper.

[44]

Cynthia Dwork, Nancy Lynch, and Larry Stockmeyer. 1988. Consensus in the presence of partial synchrony. J. ACM 35, 2 (Apr. 1988), 288–323. DOI:

Digital Library

[45]

Stefan Dziembowski, Sebastian Faust, Vladimir Kolmogorov, and Krzysztof Pietrzak. 2013. Proofs of Space. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2013/796. Retrieved from https://ia.cr/2013/796.

[46]

EOS. [n.d.]. Retrieved from https://eos.io/.

[47]

Ethereum. [n.d.]. Retrieved from https://ethereum.org/en/.

[48]

Ittay Eyal. 2015. The miner’s dilemma. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP’15). IEEE, 89–103. DOI:

Digital Library

[49]

Ittay Eyal, Adem Efe Gencer, Emin Gun Sirer, and Robbert Van Renesse. 2016. Bitcoin-NG: A scalable blockchain protocol. In Proceedings of the 13th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI’16). USENIX Association, 45–59. Retrieved from https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi16/technical-sessions/presentation/eyal.

[50]

Ittay Eyal and Emin Gün Sirer. 2018. Majority is not enough: Bitcoin mining is vulnerable. Commun. ACM 61, 7, 95–102. DOI:

Digital Library

[51]

filecoin. Filecoin Documentation. [n.d.]. Retrieved from https://docs.filecoin.io/.

[52]

Michael J. Fischer, Nancy A. Lynch, and Michael S. Paterson. 1985. Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process. J. ACM 32, 2 (Apr. 1985), 374–382. DOI:

Digital Library

[53]

Chaya Ganesh, Claudio Orlandi, and Daniel Tschudi. 2019. Proof-of-stake protocols for privacy-aware blockchains. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques. Springer International Publishing, 690–719.

Digital Library

[54]

Yingzi Gao, Yuan Lu, Zhenliang Lu, Qiang Tang, Jing Xu, and Zhenfeng Zhang. 2022. Dumbo-NG: Fast asynchronous BFT consensus with throughput-oblivious latency. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’22). ACM, New York, NY, 1187–1201. DOI:

Digital Library

[55]

Juan Garay, Aggelos Kiayias, and Nikos Leonardos. 2015. The bitcoin backbone protocol: Analysis and applications. In Proceedings of the 34th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques, Vol. 9057. Springer, 281–310. DOI:

[56]

Peter Gaži, Aggelos Kiayias, and Dionysis Zindros. 2019. Proof-of-stake sidechains. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP’19). IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA, 139–156. DOI:

[57]

Yossi Gilad, Rotem Hemo, Silvio Micali, Georgios Vlachos, and Nickolai Zeldovich. 2017. Algorand: Scaling Byzantine agreements for cryptocurrencies. In Proceedings of the 26th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP’17). ACM, New York, NY, 51–68. DOI:

Digital Library

[58]

Gochain. [n.d.]. Retrieved from https://gochain.io/.

[59]

Bingyong Guo, Yuan Lu, Zhenliang Lu, Qiang Tang, Jing Xu, and Zhenfeng Zhang. 2022. Speeding dumbo: Pushing asynchronous BFT closer to practice. In Proceedings of the 29th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS’22). The Internet Society, 1–18. Retrieved from https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2022-385-paper.pdf.

[60]

Bingyong Guo, Zhenliang Lu, Qiang Tang, Jing Xu, and Zhenfeng Zhang. 2020. Dumbo: Faster asynchronous BFT protocols. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’20). ACM, New York, NY, 803–818. DOI:

Digital Library

[61]

Zicong Hong, Song Guo, Peng Li, and Wuhui Chen. 2021. Pyramid: A layered sharding blockchain system. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Communications. IEEE, 1–10.

Digital Library

[62]

Huawei Huang, Xiaowen Peng, Jianzhou Zhan, Shenyang Zhang, Yue Lin, Zibin Zheng, and Song Guo. 2022. BrokerChain: A cross-shard blockchain protocol for account/balance-based state sharding. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Communications.

Digital Library

[63]

Jun Huang, Debiao He, Mohammad S. Obaidat, Pandi Vijayakumar, Min Luo, and Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo. 2021. The application of the blockchain technology in voting systems: A review. ACM Comput. Surv. 54, 3, Article 60 (Apr. 2021), 28 pages. DOI:

Digital Library

[64]

IOTA. [n.d.]. Retrieved from https://www.iota.org/.

[65]

Ari Juels and Burton S. Kaliski. 2007. Pors: Proofs of retrievability for large files. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’07). ACM, New York, NY, 584–597. DOI:

Digital Library

[66]

George Karypis and Vipin Kumar. 1998. A fast and high quality multilevel scheme for partitioning irregular graphs. SIAM J. Sci. Comput. 20, 1 (1998), 359–392.

Digital Library

[67]

Mahimna Kelkar, Fan Zhang, Steven Goldfeder, and Ari Juels. 2020. Order-fairness for byzantine consensus. In Proceedings of the 40th Annual International Cryptology Conference, Vol. 12172. Springer, 451–480. DOI:

Digital Library

[68]

Thomas Kerber, Aggelos Kiayias, Markulf Kohlweiss, and Vassilis Zikas. 2019. Ouroboros crypsinous: Privacy-preserving proof-of-stake. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP’19). IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA, 157–174. DOI:

[69]

Aggelos Kiayias, Alexander Russell, Bernardo David, and Roman Oliynykov. 2017. Ouroboros: A provably secure proof-of-stake blockchain protocol. In Proceedings of the 37th Annual International Cryptology Conference, Vol. 10401. Springer, 357–388. DOI:

[70]

Lucianna Kiffer, Rajmohan Rajaraman, and Abhi Shelat. 2018. A better method to analyze Blockchain consistency. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’18). ACM, New York, NY, 729–744. DOI:

Digital Library

[71]

Sunny King. 2013. Primecoin: Cryptocurrency with Prime Number Proof-of-work. Retrieved from https://primecoin.io/bin/primecoin-paper.pdf.

[72]

Sunny King and Scott Nadal. 2012. Ppcoin: Peer-to-peer Crypto-currency with Proof-of-stake. Retrieved from https://www.peercoin.net/whitepapers/peercoin-paper.pdf.

[73]

Markulf Kohlweiss, Varun Madathil, Kartik Nayak, and Alessandra Scafuro. 2021. On the anonymity guarantees of anonymous proof-of-stake protocols. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP’21). IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA, 1818–1833. DOI:

[74]

Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Philipp Jovanovic, Nicolas Gailly, Ismail Khoffi, Linus Gasser, and Bryan Ford. 2016. Enhancing bitcoin security and performance with strong consistency via collective signing. In Proceedings of the 25th USENIX Conference on Security Symposium (USENIX Security’16). USENIX Association, 279–296.

Digital Library

[75]

Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Philipp Jovanovic, Linus Gasser, Nicolas Gailly, Ewa Syta, and Bryan Ford. 2018. Omniledger: A secure, scale-out, decentralized ledger via sharding. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP’18). IEEE, 583–598. DOI:

[76]

Hugo Krawczyk and Tal Rabin. 2000. Chameleon signatures. In Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS’00). The Internet Society, Rosten, VA, 1–12. Retrieved from https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss2000/chameleon-signatures/.

[77]

Jae Kwon. 2014. Tendermint: Consensus without Mining. Retrieved from https://tendermint.com/static/docs/tendermint.pdf.

[78]

Yujin Kwon, Dohyun Kim, Yunmok Son, Eugene Vasserman, and Yongdae Kim. 2017. Be selfish and avoid dilemmas: Fork after withholding (FAW) attacks on Bitcoin. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’17). ACM, New York, NY, 195–209. DOI:

Digital Library

[79]

Leslie Lamport. 1998. The part-time parliament. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 16, 2 (May 1998), 133–169. DOI:

Digital Library

[80]

Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, and Marshall Pease. 1982. The byzantine generals problem. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 4, 3 (July 1982), 382–401. DOI:

Digital Library

[81]

Laphou Lao, Zecheng Li, Songlin Hou, Bin Xiao, Songtao Guo, and Yuanyuan Yang. 2020. A survey of IoT applications in blockchain systems: Architecture, consensus, and traffic modeling. ACM Comput. Surv. 53, 1, Article 18 (Feb. 2020), 32 pages. DOI:

Digital Library

[82]

Chenxing Li, Peilun Li, Dong Zhou, Wei Xu, Fan Long, and Andrew Yao. 2018. Scaling Nakamoto Consensus to Thousands of Transactions per Second. Retrieved from https://arxiv:cs.DC/1805.03870.

[83]

Chenxing Li, Peilun Li, Dong Zhou, Zhe Yang, Ming Wu, Guang Yang, Wei Xu, Fan Long, and Andrew Chi-Chih Yao. 2020. A decentralized blockchain with high throughput and fast confirmation. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC’20). USENIX Association, 515–528. Retrieved from https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc20/presentation/li-chenxing.

[84]

Xi Li, Zehua Wang, Victor C. M. Leung, Hong Ji, Yiming Liu, and Heli Zhang. 2021. Blockchain-empowered data-driven networks: A survey and outlook. ACM Comput. Surv. 54, 3, Article 58 (Apr. 2021), 38 pages. DOI:

Digital Library

[85]

Xing Li, Yi Zheng, Kunxian Xia, Tongcheng Sun, and John Beyler. 2020. Phantom: An Efficient Privacy Protocol Using zk-SNARKs Based on Smart Contracts. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2020/156. Retrieved from https://ia.cr/2020/156.

[86]

Litecoin. Litecoin. [n.d.]. Retrieved from https://litecoin.org/.

[87]

Loi Luu, Viswesh Narayanan, Chaodong Zheng, Kunal Baweja, Seth Gilbert, and Prateek Saxena. 2016. A secure sharding protocol for open blockchains. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’16). ACM, New York, NY, 17–30. DOI:

Digital Library

[88]

Lynx. Lynx. [n.d.]. Retrieved from https://getlynx.io/.

[89]

Dahlia Malkhi, Kartik Nayak, and Ling Ren. 2019. Flexible byzantine fault tolerance. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’19). ACM, New York, NY, 1041–1053. DOI:

Digital Library

[90]

Will Martino, Monica Quaintance, and Stuart Popejoy. 2018. Chainweb: A Proof-of-work Parallel-chain Architecture for Massive Throughput. Retrieved from https://d31d887a-c1e0-47c2-aa51-c69f9f998b07.filesusr.com/ugd/86a16f_029c9991469e4565a7c334dd716345f4.pdf.

[91]

Andrew Miller, Ari Juels, Elaine Shi, Bryan Parno, and Jonathan Katz. 2014. Permacoin: Repurposing Bitcoin work for data preservation. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP’14). IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA, 475–490. DOI:

Digital Library

[92]

Andrew Miller, Ahmed Kosba, Jonathan Katz, and Elaine Shi. 2015. Nonoutsourceable scratch-off puzzles to discourage Bitcoin mining coalitions. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’15). ACM, New York, NY, 680–691. DOI:

Digital Library

[93]

Andrew Miller, Yu Xia, Kyle Croman, Elaine Shi, and Dawn Song. 2016. The honey badger of BFT protocols. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’16). ACM, New York, NY, 31–42. DOI:

Digital Library

[94]

Atsuki Momose and Ling Ren. 2021. Multi-threshold Byzantine fault tolerance. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’21). ACM, New York, NY, 1686–1699. DOI:

Digital Library

[95]

Monero. [n.d.]. Retrieved from https://www.getmonero.org/.

[96]

Satoshi Nakamoto. 2008. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-peer Misc Cash System. Retrieved from http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf.

[97]

Lan N. Nguyen, Truc D. T. Nguyen, Thang N. Dinh, and My T. Thai. 2019. Optchain: Optimal transactions placement for scalable blockchain sharding. In Proceedings of the 39th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS’19). IEEE, 525–535.

[98]

Brian M. Oki and Barbara H. Liskov. 1988. Viewstamped replication: A new primary copy method to support highly available distributed systems. In Proceedings of the 7th Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC’88). ACM, New York, NY, 8–17. DOI:

Digital Library

[99]

Diego Ongaro and John Ousterhout. 2014. In search of an understandable consensus algorithm. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC’14). USENIX Association, 305–319. Retrieved from https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc14/technical-sessions/presentation/ongaro.

[100]

Sunoo Park, Albert Kwon, Georg Fuchsbauer, Peter Gaži, Joël Alwen, and Krzysztof Pietrzak. 2018. SpaceMint: A cryptocurrency based on proofs of space. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, Vol. 10957. Springer, Berlin, 480–499. DOI:

Digital Library

[101]

Rafael Pass, Lior Seeman, and Abhi Shelat. 2017. Analysis of the blockchain protocol in asynchronous networks. In Proceedings of the 36th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques, Vol. 10211. Springer, 643–673. DOI:

[102]

Rafael Pass and Elaine Shi. 2017. FruitChains: A fair blockchain. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC’17). ACM, New York, NY, 315–324. DOI:

Digital Library

[103]

Rafael Pass and Elaine Shi. 2017. The sleepy model of consensus. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptology and Information Security. Springer, 380–409. DOI:

[104]

Colin Percival and Simon Josefsson. 2016. The scrypt password-based key derivation function. Retrieved from http://tools.ietf.org/html/josefsson-scrypt-kdf-00.txt.

[105]

Serguei Popov. 2018. The Tangle. Retrieved from http://www.descryptions.com/Iota.pdf.

[106]

Daniël Reijsbergen, Pawel Szalachowski, Junming Ke, Zengpeng Li, and Jianying Zhou. 2021. ProPoS: A probabilistic proof-of-stake protocol. In Proceedings of the 28th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS’21). The Internet Society, 1–18.

[107]

Ling Ren and Srinivas Devadas. 2016. Proof of space from stacked expanders. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Theory of Cryptography, Vol. 9985. Springer, Berlin, 262–285. DOI:

Digital Library

[108]

Eli Ben Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Christina Garman, Matthew Green, Ian Miers, Eran Tromer, and Madars Virza. 2014. Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from bitcoin. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP’14). IEEE, 459–474. DOI:

Digital Library

[109]

Hyperledger Sawtooth. [n.d.]. Retrieved from https://www.hyperledger.org/use/sawtooth.

[110]

Peiyao Sheng, Gerui Wang, Kartik Nayak, Sreeram Kannan, and Pramod Viswanath. 2021. BFT protocol forensics. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’21). ACM, New York, NY, 1722–1743. DOI:

Digital Library

[111]

Ali Shoker. 2018. Brief announcement: Sustainable blockchains through proof of EXercise. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC’18). ACM, New York, NY, 269–271. DOI:

Digital Library

[112]

Amritraj Singh, Kelly Click, Reza M. Parizi, Qi Zhang, Ali Dehghantanha, and Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo. 2020. Sidechain technologies in blockchain networks: An examination and state-of-the-art review. J. Netw. Comput. Appl. 149 (2020), 102471. DOI:

Digital Library

[113]

Yonatan Sompolinsky, Yoad Lewenberg, and Aviv Zohar. 2016. SPECTRE: A Fast and Scalable Cryptocurrency Protocol. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2016/1159. Retrieved from https://ia.cr/2016/1159.

[114]

Yonatan Sompolinsky and Aviv Zohar. 2015. Secure high-rate transaction processing in bitcoin. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, Vol. 8975. Springer, Berlin, 507–527. DOI:

[115]

Ewa Syta, Philipp Jovanovic, Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias, Nicolas Gailly, Linus Gasser, Ismail Khoffi, Michael J. Fischer, and Bryan Ford. 2017. Scalable bias-resistant distributed randomness. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP’17). IEEE, 444–460. DOI:

[116]

Ewa Syta, Iulia Tamas, Dylan Visher, David Isaac Wolinsky, Philipp Jovanovic, Linus Gasser, Nicolas Gailly, Ismail Khoffi, and Bryan Ford. 2016. Keeping authorities “Honest or Bust” with decentralized witness cosigning. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP’16). IEEE, 526–545. DOI:

[117]

Pawel Szalachowski, Daniël Reijsbergen, Ivan Homoliak, and Siwei Sun. 2019. Strongchain: Transparent and collaborative proof-of-work consensus. In Proceedings of the 28th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security’19). USENIX Association, 819–836. Retrieved from https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity19/presentation/szalachowski.

[118]

Yuechen Tao, Bo Li, Jingjie Jiang, Hok Chu Ng, Cong Wang, and Baochun Li. 2020. On sharding open blockchains with smart contracts. In Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE’20). IEEE, 1357–1368.

[119]

Tendermint. [n.d.]. Retrieved from https://tendermint.com/.

[120]

Huibo Wang, Guoxing Chen, Yinqian Zhang, and Zhiqiang Lin. 2022. Multi-certificate attacks against proof-of-elapsed-time and their countermeasures. In Proceedings of the 29th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS’22). The Internet Society, 1–17. Retrieved from https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2022-158-paper.pdf.

[121]

Jiaping Wang and Hao Wang. 2019. Monoxide: Scale out blockchains with asynchronous consensus zones. In Proceedings of the 16th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI’19). USENIX Association, Boston, MA, 95–112. Retrieved from https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi19/presentation/wang-jiaping.

[122]

Xuechao Wang, Viswa Virinchi Muppirala, Lei Yang, Sreeram Kannan, and Pramod Viswanath. 2021. Securing Parallel-chain Protocols under Variable Mining Power. Retrieved from https://arxiv:cs.CR/2105.02927.

[123]

Gavin Wood. 2021. Ethereum: A Secure Decentralised Generalised Transaction Ledger. Retrieved from https://ethereum.github.io/yellowpaper/paper.pdf.

[124]

Cheng Xu, Ce Zhang, Jianliang Xu, and Jian Pei. 2021. SlimChain: Scaling blockchain transactions through off-chain storage and parallel processing. Proc. VLDB Endow. 14, 11 (2021), 2314–2326.

Digital Library

[125]

Jie Xu, Yingying Cheng, Cong Wang, and Xiaohua Jia. 2021. Occam: A secure and adaptive scaling protocol for permissionless blockchain. In Proceedings of the 41st IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS’21). IEEE, 618–628. DOI:

[126]

Lei Yang, Vivek Bagaria, Gerui Wang, Mohammad Alizadeh, David Tse, Giulia Fanti, and Pramod Viswanath. 2020. Prism: Scaling Bitcoin by 10,000x. Retrieved from https://arxiv:cs.DC/1909.11261.

[127]

Lei Yang, Seo Jin Park, Mohammad Alizadeh, Sreeram Kannan, and David Tse. 2022. DispersedLedger: High-throughput byzantine consensus on variable bandwidth networks. In Proceedings of the 19th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI’19). USENIX Association, 493–512. Retrieved from https://www.usenix.org/system/files/nsdi22-paper-yang_lei.pdf.

[128]

Maofan Yin, Dahlia Malkhi, Michael K. Reiter, Guy Golan Gueta, and Ittai Abraham. 2019. HotStuff: BFT consensus with linearity and responsiveness. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC’19). ACM, New York, NY, 347–356. DOI:

Digital Library

[129]

Haifeng Yu, Ivica Nikolić, Ruomu Hou, and Prateek Saxena. 2020. OHIE: Blockchain scaling made simple. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP’20). IEEE, 90–105. DOI:

[130]

Mahdi Zamani, Mahnush Movahedi, and Mariana Raykova. 2018. RapidChain: Scaling blockchain via full sharding. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’18). ACM, New York, NY, 931–948. DOI:

Digital Library

[131]

Zcash. [n.d.]. Retrieved from https://z.cash/.

[132]

Ren Zhang and Bart Preneel. 2019. Lay down the common metrics: Evaluating proof-of-work consensus protocols’security. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP’19). IEEE, 175–192. DOI:

[133]

Ren Zhang, Dingwei Zhang, Quake Wang, Shichen Wu, Jan Xie, and Bart Preneel. 2022. NC-Max: Breaking the security-performance tradeoff in nakamoto consensus. In Proceedings of the 29th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS’22). The Internet Society, 1–18. Retrieved from https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2022-370-paper.pdf.

[134]

Yunhao Zhang, Srinath Setty, Qi Chen, Lidong Zhou, and Lorenzo Alvisi. 2020. Byzantine ordered consensus without Byzantine oligarchy. In Proceedings of the 14th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI’20). USENIX Association, 633–649. Retrieved from https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi20/presentation/zhang-yunhao.

Cited By

Wang HLi HFan PKang JDeng SZhu X(2024)PnV: An Efficient Parallel Consensus Protocol Integrating Proof and VotingApplied Sciences10.3390/app1408351014:8(3510)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/app14083510
Tian SZhang YBi YYuan T(2024)Blockchain-based 6G task offloading and cooperative computing resource allocation studyJournal of Cloud Computing: Advances, Systems and Applications10.1186/s13677-024-00655-313:1Online publication date: 6-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1186/s13677-024-00655-3
Keizer NAscigil OKról MKutscher DPavlou G(2024)A Survey on Content Retrieval on the Decentralised WebACM Computing Surveys10.1145/364913256:8(1-39)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3649132
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

A Survey of Blockchain Consensus Protocols

Recommendations

From blockchain consensus back to Byzantine consensus
Abstract
Consensus is a fundamental problem of distributed computing. While this problem has been known to be unsolvable since 1985, existing protocols were designed these past three decades to solve consensus under various assumptions. Today, ...
Highlights
- We compare the different consensus problems tackled by blockchains, the distributed computing literature and a more recent definition.
A survey of blockchain consensus safety and security: State-of-the-art, challenges, and future work
Abstract
Blockchain technology has been widely used in finance, Internet of Things, insurance, and other fields since it was proposed in 2008. As a part of blockchain technology, the consensus protocol has a profound impact on the safety and ...
Graphical abstract

Display Omitted
Highlights
- A discussion of safety and security problems of blockchain consensus protocols.
A Survey on Blockchain Technology Concepts, Applications, and Issues
Abstract
The blockchain technology first emerged with the Bitcoin whitepaper, which was the first successful proposal to implement a decentralized digital currency with ability to execute completely non-reversible transactions without a trusted and ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Computing Surveys

ACM Computing Surveys Volume 55, Issue 13s

December 2023

1367 pages

ISSN:0360-0300

EISSN:1557-7341

DOI:10.1145/3606252

Editor:
Albert Zomaya
University of Sydney, Australia

Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 July 2023

Online AM: 11 January 2023

Accepted: 03 January 2023

Revised: 06 December 2022

Received: 24 November 2021

Published in CSUR Volume 55, Issue 13s

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Survey

Funding Sources

Hong Kong RGC GRF
RGC RIF

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

76
Total Citations
View Citations
4,915
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)2,542
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)305

Reflects downloads up to 10 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Wang HLi HFan PKang JDeng SZhu X(2024)PnV: An Efficient Parallel Consensus Protocol Integrating Proof and VotingApplied Sciences10.3390/app1408351014:8(3510)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/app14083510
Tian SZhang YBi YYuan T(2024)Blockchain-based 6G task offloading and cooperative computing resource allocation studyJournal of Cloud Computing: Advances, Systems and Applications10.1186/s13677-024-00655-313:1Online publication date: 6-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1186/s13677-024-00655-3
Keizer NAscigil OKról MKutscher DPavlou G(2024)A Survey on Content Retrieval on the Decentralised WebACM Computing Surveys10.1145/364913256:8(1-39)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3649132
Zhou ZOnireti OXu HZhang LImran M(2024)AI and Blockchain Enabled Future Wireless Networks: A Survey And OutlookDistributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice10.1145/36443693:3(1-30)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3644369
Wang HLi HSmahi AXiao MLi S(2024)GBT-CHAIN: A System Framework for Solving the General Trilemma in Permissioned BlockchainsDistributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice10.1145/36158713:2(1-15)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3615871
Haslhofer BVictor FXu JLam KChua TNgo CKumar RLauw HKa-Wei Lee R(2024)CAAW'24: The 3rd International Cryptoasset Analytics WorkshopCompanion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589335.3641304(1741-1741)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589335.3641304
Bai FShen TYu ZSong JGong BWaqas MAlasmary H(2024)Blockchain-Enhanced Time-Variant Mean Field-Optimized Dynamic Computation Sharing in Mobile NetworkIEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications10.1109/TWC.2024.338841123:9_Part_2(12140-12156)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TWC.2024.3388411
Hao RDai XDai W(2024)BitFT: An Understandable, Performant and Resource-Efficient Blockchain ConsensusIEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing10.1109/TSUSC.2023.33414409:3(522-534)Online publication date: May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSUSC.2023.3341440
Fattahi J(2024)A Federated Byzantine Agreement Model to Operate Offline Electric Vehicle Supply EquipmentIEEE Transactions on Smart Grid10.1109/TSG.2023.330767915:2(2004-2016)Online publication date: Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSG.2023.3307679
Yang NTang CXiong ZHe D(2024)RCME: A Reputation Incentive Committee Consensus-Based for Matchmaking Encryption in IoT HealthcareIEEE Transactions on Services Computing10.1109/TSC.2024.338769117:5(2790-2806)Online publication date: Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSC.2024.3387691
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Full Text

View this article in Full Text.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View full text|Download PDF

View Issue’s Table of Contents