Trusted Hardware-Assisted Leaderless Byzantine Fault Tolerance Consensus

Liangrong Zhao; Jérémie Decouchant; Joseph K. Liu; Qinghua Lu; Jiangshan Yu

Paper 2025/1033 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2025/1033 ↗

Trusted Hardware-Assisted Leaderless Byzantine Fault Tolerance Consensus

Liangrong Zhao

Jérémie Decouchant

Joseph K. Liu

Qinghua Lu

Jiangshan Yu

Abstract

Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) Consensus protocols with trusted hardware assistance have been extensively explored for their improved resilience to tolerate more faulty processes. Nonetheless, the potential of trust hardware has been scarcely investigated in leaderless BFT protocols. RedBelly is assumed to be the first blockchain network whose consensus is based on a truly leaderless BFT algorithm. This paper proposes a trusted hardware-assisted leaderless BFT consensus protocol by offering a hybrid solution for the set BFT problem defined in the RedBelly blockchain. Drawing on previous studies, we present two crucial trusted services: the counter and the collector. Based on these two services, we introduce two primitives to formulate our leaderless BFT protocol: a hybrid verified broadcast (VRB) protocol and a hybrid binary agreement. The hybrid VRB protocol enhances the hybrid reliable broadcast protocol by integrating a verification function. This addition ensures that a broadcast message is verified not only for authentication but also for the correctness of its content. Our hybrid BFT consensus is integrated with these broadcast protocols to deliver binary decisions on all proposals. We prove the correctness of the proposed hybrid protocol and demonstrate its enhanced performance in comparison to the prior trusted BFT protocol.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Applications
Publication info: Preprint.
History: 2025-06-03: last updated; 2025-06-03: published
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2025/1033
License: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/1033,
      author = {Liangrong Zhao and Jérémie Decouchant and Joseph K. Liu and Qinghua Lu and Jiangshan Yu},
      title = {Trusted Hardware-Assisted Leaderless Byzantine Fault Tolerance Consensus},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/1033},
      year = {2025},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1033}
}