Towards Rational Consensus in Honest Majority
Varul Srivastava, Sujit Gujar

TL;DR
This paper investigates atomic broadcast consensus in blockchain-like systems under rational and Byzantine adversaries, proposing a new protocol extsf{pRFT} that achieves agreement with accountability in partially synchronous networks.
Contribution
It introduces a novel protocol extsf{pRFT} for rational fault tolerance in partially synchronous networks, addressing limitations of existing protocols under complex threat models.
Findings
C is impossible for certain adversary thresholds with specific rational preferences.
The existing Ranchal-Pedrosa and Gramoli protocol cannot be generalized for ABC due to insecure Nash equilibrium.
extsf{pRFT} achieves atomic broadcast with accountability under specified rational and Byzantine adversary conditions.
Abstract
Distributed consensus protocols reach agreement among players in the presence of adversaries; different protocols support different values of . Existing works study this problem for different adversary types (captured by threat models). There are three primary threat models: (i) Crash fault tolerance (CFT), (ii) Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT), and (iii) Rational fault tolerance (RFT), each more general than the previous. Agreement in repeated rounds on both (1) the proposed value in each round and (2) the ordering among agreed-upon values across multiple rounds is called Atomic BroadCast (ABC). ABC is more generalized than consensus and is employed in blockchains. This work studies ABC under the RFT threat model. We consider byzantine and rational adversaries among players. We also study different types of rational players based on their utility towards (1)…
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Taxonomy
TopicsCryptography and Data Security · Logic, Reasoning, and Knowledge · Complexity and Algorithms in Graphs
