Alea-BFT: Practical Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance

TL;DR

Alea-BFT is a simple, efficient asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance protocol that improves performance and practicality, enabling adoption in real-world systems like Ethereum validators.

Contribution

It introduces a novel two-stage pipelined design with a designated replica, combining simplicity with high efficiency for asynchronous BFT.

Findings

Outperforms Dumbo-NG in latency

Shows robustness under network faults

Successfully integrated into cryptocurrency ecosystems

Abstract

Traditional Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) state machine replication protocols assume a partial synchrony model, leading to a design where a leader replica drives the protocol and is replaced after a timeout. Recently, we witnessed a surge of asynchronous BFT protocols, which use randomization to remove the need for bounds on message delivery times, making them more resilient to adverse network conditions. However, existing research proposals still fall short of gaining practical adoption, plausibly because they are not able to combine good performance with a simple design that can be readily understood and adopted. In this paper, we present Alea-BFT, a simple and highly efficient asynchronous BFT protocol, which is gaining practical adoption, namely in Ethereum distributed validators. Alea-BFT brings the key design insight from classical protocols of concentrating part of the work on a single designated replica and incorporates this principle in a simple two-stage pipelined design, with an efficient broadcast led by the designated replica, followed by an inexpensive binary agreement. The evaluation of our research prototype implementation and two real-world integrations in cryptocurrency ecosystems shows excellent performance, improving on the fastest protocol (Dumbo-NG) in terms of latency and displaying good performance under faults.