Cob: a Leaderless Protocol for Parallel Byzantine Agreement in Incomplete Networks

TL;DR

Cob is a leaderless Byzantine agreement protocol designed for incomplete, gossip-based networks, enabling consensus without full network participation, suitable for practical distributed systems like sharding in blockchains.

Contribution

This paper extends the MBA protocol to incomplete networks with asynchronous clocks, creating Cob, a leaderless Byzantine agreement protocol for real-world communication scenarios.

Findings

Cob maintains security with a supermajority of honest nodes.

Performance comparable to Algorand in similar settings.

Proven correctness and security under specified assumptions.

Abstract

In this paper we extend the \emph{Multidimensional Byzantine Agreement (MBA) Protocol}, a {leaderless} Byzantine agreement for lists of arbitrary values, into a protocol suitable for wide gossiping networks: \emph{Cob}. This generalization allows the consensus process to be run by an incomplete network of nodes provided with (non-synchronized) same-speed clocks. Not all nodes are active in every step, so the network size does not hamper the efficiency, as long as the gossiping broadcast delivers the messages to every node in reasonable time. These network assumptions model more closely real-life communication channels, so the Cob protocol may be applicable to a variety of practical problems, such as blockchain platforms implementing sharding. Cob has the same Bernoulli-like distribution that upper-bounds the number of steps as the MBA protocol. We prove its correctness and security assuming a supermajority of honest nodes in the network, and compare its performance with Algorand.