Adelie: Detection and prevention of Byzantine behaviour in DAG-based consensus protocols

TL;DR

Adelie is a new Byzantine fault-tolerant protocol for DAG-based consensus that enhances security against Byzantine attacks while maintaining high throughput and low latency, building on recent advances in DAG protocols.

Contribution

The paper introduces Adelie, a novel protocol that addresses Byzantine vulnerabilities in uncertified DAGs and integrates techniques from Shoal++ to improve performance.

Findings

Achieved high TPS with low latency in implementation

Identified new Byzantine attack vectors in uncertified DAGs

Demonstrated improved security and performance over previous protocols

Abstract

Recent developments in the Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus protocols have shown the DAG-based protocols to be a very promising technique. While early implementations of DAG-based protocols such as Narwhal/Bullshark trade high throughput for a low latency, the latest versions of DAG-based protocols such as Mysticeti and Shoal++ show that indeed a latency comparable to that of traditional consensus protocols such as HotStuff can be achieve with the DAG-based consensus protocols while still maintaining high throughput. Mysticeti in particular achieves a low latency by implementing a novel approach of using an uncertified DAG - a significant breakthrough comparing to the certified DAG used in the previous generations of the protocol. However, the uncertified DAG exposes the system to new vectors of attacks by Byzantine validators that did not exist in the certified DAG protocols. In this paper we describe those issues and present the Adelie protocol, that addresses issues that comes with an uncertified DAG. We also incorporate some of the techniques from the Shoal++ to reduce latency even further. This paper also presents an implementation of Adelie protocol - bftd that demonstrates yet another breakthrough in the maximum achieved TPS and low latency.