Paper 2023/192 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2023/192 ↗

Faithful Simulation of Randomized BFT Protocols on Block DAGs

Abstract

Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) protocols that are based on Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) are attractive due to their many advantages in asynchronous blockchain systems. These DAG-based protocols can be viewed as a simulation of some BFT protocol on a DAG. Many DAG-based BFT protocols rely on randomization, since they are used for agreement and ordering of transactions, which cannot be achieved deterministically in asynchronous systems. Randomization is achieved either through local sources of randomness, or by employing shared objects that provide a common source of randomness, e.g., common coins. A DAG simulation of a randomized protocol should be faithful, in the sense that it precisely preserves the properties of the original BFT protocol, and in particular, their probability distributions. We argue that faithfulness is ensured by a forward simulation. We show how to faithfully simulate any BFT protocol that uses public coins and shared objects, like common coins.