The 8th KIR: NetS&P Lab (KAIST)_Securing and Improving BFT Consensus Protocols with Advanced Networking

Completed
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Summary

KLAY Funding

  • Proposed: KLAY worth of USD 150,000
  • Accepted: KLAY worth of USD150,000
  • Total Received Amount to Date: KLAY worth of USD 20,000
    • Reference : Klaytn price today, KLAY marketcap, chart, and info | CoinMarketCap 1
    • 21.06.23.(Tx): 19,944 KLAY - $20K (1 KLAY = US$ 1.002857)

Proposal

Status

  • Ongoing

Brief Introduction of the Project

For much improved transaction volume, latency, and finality, many blockchain systems utilize
BFT consensus protocols. In particular, permissioned blockchains enjoy the full benefits of
BFT consensus among a small (e.g., a few tens or hundreds) group of distributed nodes.
One remaining problem though is the limited scalability of BFT consensus protocols. In
particular, the many existing protocols, such as PBFT, Istanbul BFT, have quadratic message
complexity to the number of replicas in the system, and this makes the blockchains hard to
scale beyond a few tens of nodes participating in consensus. Some newer proposals have
attempted to reduce the message complexity via committee selections, threshold signatures,
and trusted hardware.

In this proposal, we ask whether the current network infrastructure is properly used for the
BFT consensus protocols in permissioned blockchains and investigate if emerging network
primitives can further improve the throughput performance. First, we plan to study whether
the current Internet infrastructure is properly used for scalable operation of the Istanbul BFT
consensus protocol in real large-scale blockchain networks like Klaytn. Particularly, we will
perform an in-depth evaluation on the effect of the current underlying Internet architecture of
the commercial blockchains on their throughput performance. Furthermore, we aim to utilize
emerging hardware-based networking primitives, such as programmable switches, to further
speed up the message propagation in the Istanbul BFT consensus protocol.

Key Deliverables

  1. Analyzing potential risks of Istanbul BFT consensus protocol against network adversaries
  2. Scaling up Istanbul BFT consensus protocol with programmable switches
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