The availability-accountability dilemma and its resolution via accountability gadgets
International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, 2022•Springer
For applications of Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols where the participants
are economic agents, recent works highlighted the importance of accountability: the ability to
identify participants who provably violate the protocol. At the same time, being able to reach
consensus under dynamic levels of participation is desirable for censorship resistance. We
identify an availability-accountability dilemma: in an environment with dynamic participation,
no protocol can simultaneously be accountably-safe and live. We provide a resolution to this …
are economic agents, recent works highlighted the importance of accountability: the ability to
identify participants who provably violate the protocol. At the same time, being able to reach
consensus under dynamic levels of participation is desirable for censorship resistance. We
identify an availability-accountability dilemma: in an environment with dynamic participation,
no protocol can simultaneously be accountably-safe and live. We provide a resolution to this …
Abstract
For applications of Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols where the participants are economic agents, recent works highlighted the importance of accountability: the ability to identify participants who provably violate the protocol. At the same time, being able to reach consensus under dynamic levels of participation is desirable for censorship resistance. We identify an availability-accountability dilemma: in an environment with dynamic participation, no protocol can simultaneously be accountably-safe and live. We provide a resolution to this dilemma by constructing a provably secure optimally-resilient accountability gadget to checkpoint a longest chain protocol, such that the full ledger is live under dynamic participation and the checkpointed prefix ledger is accountable. Our accountability gadget construction is black-box and can use any BFT protocol which is accountable under static participation. Using HotStuff as the black box, we implemented our construction as a protocol for the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain, and our Internet-scale experiments with more than 4, 000 nodes show that the protocol achieves the required scalability and has better latency than the current solution Gasper, which was shown insecure by recent attacks.
Springer