Fides: Secure and Scalable Asynchronous DAG Consensus via Trusted Components

TL;DR

Fides is a novel asynchronous DAG-based BFT consensus protocol that leverages trusted execution environments to significantly improve scalability, efficiency, and latency in distributed systems.

Contribution

Fides introduces TEEs into DAG-based BFT consensus, reducing communication complexity and commit latency, and redefines DAG rules for better performance and formal liveness bounds.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art protocols in latency and throughput.

Achieves minimal commit latency with a four-round rule.

Uses TEE-assisted primitives to enhance scalability and security.

Abstract

DAG-based BFT consensus has attracted growing interest in distributed data management systems for consistent replication in untrusted settings due to its high throughput and resilience to asynchrony. However, existing protocols still suffer from high communication overhead and long commit latency. In parallel, introducing minimal hardware trust has proven effective in reducing the complexity of BFT consensus. Inspired by these works, we present Fides, an asynchronous DAG-based BFT consensus protocol that, to our knowledge, is among the first to leverage TEEs to enhance both scalability and efficiency. Fides tolerates a minority of Byzantine replicas and achieves $O(\kappa n^2 + n^3)$ metadata communication complexity through a customized TEE-assisted Reliable Broadcast (T-RBC) primitive with linear communication complexity in one-step broadcast.Building on T-RBC, Fides redefines the DAG construction rules by reducing the reference requirement from $2f+1$ to $f+1$ between consecutive vertices. This new structure weakens DAG connectivity and invalidates traditional commit rules, so we formally abstract the problem and derive new theoretical bounds of liveness. We further propose a four-round commit rule that achieves the theoretically minimal commit latency. Besides, we design two additional primitives, T-RoundCert and T-Coin, to efficiently certify DAG references and replace the costly cryptographic common coin used in prior protocols.Comprehensive evaluations on geo-distributed and local testbeds show that Fides substantially outperforms state-of-the-art protocols, including Tusk, Bullshark, Mysticeti, RCC, Damysus, Achilles and HybridSet, achieving lower latency and higher throughput while preserving strong safety and liveness guarantees.