Cerberus: Minimalistic Multi-shard Byzantine-resilient Transaction Processing

TL;DR

Cerberus introduces minimalistic, scalable primitives for multi-shard transaction processing in blockchains, balancing parallelism and fault tolerance to improve performance in distributed ledger systems.

Contribution

The paper presents Cerberus, a set of primitives for efficient multi-shard transaction processing, including Core-Cerberus, Optimistic-Cerberus, and Pessimistic-Cerberus, addressing scalability and fault tolerance.

Findings

Cerberus achieves high transaction throughput in practical environments.

Core-Cerberus operates perfectly with well-behaved clients but lacks guarantees for others.

Optimistic and Pessimistic variants balance coordination costs and fault tolerance.

Abstract

To enable high-performance and scalable blockchains, we need to step away from traditional consensus-based fully-replicated designs. One direction is to explore the usage of sharding in which we partition the managed dataset over many shards that independently operate as blockchains. Sharding requires an efficient fault-tolerant primitive for the ordering and execution of multi-shard transactions, however. In this work, we seek to design such a primitive suitable for distributed ledger networks with high transaction throughput. To do so, we propose Cerberus, a set of minimalistic primitives for processing single-shard and multi-shard UTXO-like transactions. Cerberus aims at maximizing parallel processing at shards while minimizing coordination within and between shards. First, we propose Core-Cerberus, that uses strict environmental requirements to enable simple yet powerful multi-shard transaction processing. In our intended UTXO-environment, Core-Cerberus will operate perfectly with respect to all transactions proposed and approved by well-behaved clients, but does not provide any guarantees for other transactions. To also support more general-purpose environments, we propose two generalizations of Core-Cerberus: we propose Optimistic-Cerberus, a protocol that does not require any additional coordination phases in the well-behaved optimistic case, while requiring intricate coordination when recovering from attacks; and we propose Pessimistic-Cerberus, a protocol that adds sufficient coordination to the well-behaved case of Core-Cerberus, allowing it to operate in a general-purpose fault-tolerant environments without significant costs to recover from attacks. Finally, we compare the three protocols, showing their potential scalability and high transaction throughput in practical environments.