A Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Consensus Library for Hyperledger Fabric

TL;DR

This paper presents a new Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) ordering service for Hyperledger Fabric, addressing a critical gap by enabling production-grade BFT consensus in a modular blockchain platform.

Contribution

It introduces a novel BFT consensus library based on BFT-Smart, integrated into Fabric, and demonstrates its effectiveness compared to existing crash fault-tolerant solutions.

Findings

BFT ordering service is feasible and effective in Fabric.

The BFT library outperforms CFT in fault tolerance.

The solution is adaptable to various blockchain use-cases.

Abstract

Hyperledger Fabric is an enterprise grade permissioned distributed ledger platform that offers modularity for a broad set of industry use cases. One modular component is a pluggable ordering service that establishes consensus on the order of transactions and batches them into blocks. However, as of the time of this writing, there is no production grade Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) ordering service for Fabric, with the latest version (v2.1) supporting only Crash Fault-Tolerance (CFT). In our work, we address crucial aspects of BFT integration into Fabric that were left unsolved in all prior works, making them unfit for production use. In this work we describe the design and implementation of a BFT ordering service for Fabric, employing a new BFT consensus library. The new library, based on the BFT-Smart protocol and written in Go, is tailored to the blockchain use-case, yet is general enough to cater to a wide variety of other uses. We evaluate the new BFT ordering service by comparing it with the currently supported Raft-based CFT ordering service in Hyperledger Fabric.