Paper 2023/1301 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2023/1301 ↗

Short Paper: Accountable Safety Implies Finality

Joachim Neu
Ertem Nusret Tas
David Tse
Abstract

Motivated by proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains such as Ethereum, two key desiderata have recently been studied for Byzantine-fault tolerant (BFT) state-machine replication (SMR) consensus protocols: Finality means that the protocol retains consistency, as long as less than a certain fraction of validators are malicious, even in partially-synchronous environments that allow for temporary violations of assumed network delay bounds. Accountable safety means that in any case of inconsistency, a certain fraction of validators can be identified to have provably violated the protocol. Earlier works have developed impossibility results and protocol constructions for these properties separately. We show that accountable safety implies finality, thereby unifying earlier results.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Preprint.
History
2023-12-28: last updated
2023-08-31: published
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2023/1301
License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2023/1301,
      author = {Joachim Neu and Ertem Nusret Tas and David Tse},
      title = {Short Paper: Accountable Safety Implies Finality},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2023/1301},
      year = {2023},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1301}
}
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