Dissecting BFT Consensus: In Trusted Components we Trust!

TL;DR

This paper critically analyzes Trust-BFT consensus protocols, identifies key limitations, and introduces FlexiTrust, a new suite of protocols that significantly improves throughput by up to 185%.

Contribution

It uncovers fundamental limitations in existing Trust-BFT protocols and proposes FlexiTrust, a novel suite that overcomes these issues to enhance performance.

Findings

FlexiTrust achieves up to 185% higher throughput.

Identifies three fundamental limitations in current Trust-BFT protocols.

Proposes solutions to overcome limitations for practical deployment.

Abstract

The growing interest in reliable multi-party applications has fostered widespread adoption of Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols. Existing BFT protocols need f more replicas than Paxos-style protocols to prevent equivocation attacks. Trust-BFT protocols instead seek to minimize this cost by making use of trusted components at replicas. This paper makes two contributions. First, we analyze the design of existing Trust-BFT protocols and uncover three fundamental limitations that preclude most practical deployments. Some of these limitations are fundamental, while others are linked to the state of trusted components today. Second, we introduce a novel suite of consensus protocols, FlexiTrust, that attempts to sidestep these issues. We show that our FlexiTrust protocols achieve up to 185% more throughput than their Trust-BFT counterparts.