Scalable Byzantine Consensus via Hardware-assisted Secret Sharing

TL;DR

FastBFT is a scalable Byzantine fault-tolerant protocol that leverages hardware-assisted secret sharing and message aggregation to achieve high throughput and low latency in large networks, improving over existing protocols.

Contribution

Introduces FastBFT, a novel BFT protocol combining hardware TEEs and secret sharing for scalable and efficient consensus.

Findings

FastBFT outperforms previous BFT protocols in scalability and performance.

Achieves low latency and high throughput in large-scale networks.

Utilizes hardware-based trusted execution environments for secure message aggregation.

Abstract

The surging interest in blockchain technology has revitalized the search for effective Byzantine consensus schemes. In particular, the blockchain community has been looking for ways to effectively integrate traditional Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols into a blockchain consensus layer allowing various financial institutions to securely agree on the order of transactions. However, existing BFT protocols can only scale to tens of nodes due to their $O(n^2)$ message complexity. In this paper, we propose FastBFT, a fast and scalable BFT protocol. At the heart of FastBFT is a novel message aggregation technique that combines hardware-based trusted execution environments (TEEs) with lightweight secret sharing primitives. Combining this technique with several other optimizations (i.e., optimistic execution, tree topology and failure detection), FastBFT achieves low latency and high throughput even for large scale networks. Via systematic analysis and experiments, we demonstrate that FastBFT has better scalability and performance than previous BFT protocols.