Frosty: Bringing strong liveness guarantees to the Snow family of consensus protocols

TL;DR

This paper enhances the Snow family of consensus protocols by providing formal consistency proofs and a liveness module that guarantees progress even under Byzantine attacks, while maintaining scalability benefits.

Contribution

It introduces a liveness module for Snowman that ensures progress during Byzantine attacks and provides a simple proof of consistency for Snowman.

Findings

Formal proof of Snowman's consistency

Liveness guarantees under Byzantine attacks

Maintains low communication overhead during normal operation

Abstract

Snowman is the consensus protocol implemented by the Avalanche blockchain and is part of the Snow family of protocols, first introduced through the original Avalanche leaderless consensus protocol. A major advantage of Snowman is that each consensus decision only requires an expected constant communication overhead per processor in the `common' case that the protocol is not under substantial Byzantine attack, i.e. it provides a solution to the scalability problem which ensures that the expected communication overhead per processor is independent of the total number of processors $n$ during normal operation. This is the key property that would enable a consensus protocol to scale to 10,000 or more independent validators (i.e. processors). On the other hand, the two following concerns have remained: (1) Providing formal proofs of consistency for Snowman has presented a formidable challenge. (2) Liveness attacks exist in the case that a Byzantine adversary controls more than $O(\sqrt{n})$ processors, slowing termination to more than a logarithmic number of steps. In this paper, we address the two issues above. We consider a Byzantine adversary that controls at most $f<n/5$ processors. First, we provide a simple proof of consistency for Snowman. Then we supplement Snowman with a `liveness module' that can be triggered in the case that a substantial adversary launches a liveness attack, and which guarantees liveness in this event by temporarily forgoing the communication complexity advantages of Snowman, but without sacrificing these low communication complexity advantages during normal operation.