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Asynchronous Consensus without Trusted Setup or Public-Key Cryptography

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Victor ShoupAuthors Info & Claims

CCS '24: Proceedings of the 2024 on ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Pages 3242 - 3256

https://doi.org/10.1145/3658644.3670327

Published: 09 December 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Byzantine consensus is a fundamental building block in distributed cryptographic problems. Despite decades of research, most existing asynchronous consensus protocols require a strong trusted setup and expensive public-key cryptography. In this paper, we study asynchronous Byzantine consensus protocols that do not rely on a trusted setup and do not use public-key cryptography such as digital signatures. We give an Asynchronous Common Subset (ACS) protocol whose security is only based on cryptographic hash functions modeled as a random oracle. Our protocol has O(κn³) total communication and runs in expected O(1) rounds. The fact that we use only cryptographic hash functions also means that our protocol is post-quantum secure. The minimal use of cryptography and the small number of rounds make our protocol practical. We implement our protocol and evaluate it in a geo-distributed setting with up to 128 machines. Our experimental evaluation shows that our protocol is more efficient than the only other setup-free consensus protocol that has been implemented to date. En route to our asynchronous consensus protocols, we also introduce new primitives called asynchronous secret key sharing and cover gather, which may be of independent interest.

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Cited By

Abraham IAshsarov GPatra AStern G(2024)Asynchronous Agreement on a Core Set in Constant Expected Time and More Efficient Asynchronous VSS and MPCTheory of Cryptography10.1007/978-3-031-78023-3_15(451-482)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-78023-3_15

Index Terms

Asynchronous Consensus without Trusted Setup or Public-Key Cryptography
1. Security and privacy
  1. Systems security
    1. Distributed systems security

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cover image ACM Conferences

CCS '24: Proceedings of the 2024 on ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

December 2024

5188 pages

ISBN:9798400706363

DOI:10.1145/3658644

General Chairs:
Bo Luo
University of Kansas, USA
,
Xiaojing Liao
Indiana University Bloomington, USA
,
Jun Xu
University of Utah, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Engin Kirda
Northeastern University, USA
,
David Lie
University of Toronto, Canada

Copyright © 2024 ACM.

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Published: 09 December 2024

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Beijing Natural Science Foundation
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CCS '24: ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

October 14 - 18, 2024

UT, Salt Lake City, USA

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Cited By

Abraham IAshsarov GPatra AStern G(2024)Asynchronous Agreement on a Core Set in Constant Expected Time and More Efficient Asynchronous VSS and MPCTheory of Cryptography10.1007/978-3-031-78023-3_15(451-482)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-78023-3_15

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