Leader Rotation Is Not Enough: Scrutinizing Leadership Democracy of Chained BFT Consensus

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the leadership democracy of chained BFT protocols, revealing that leader rotation alone is insufficient for democracy and proposing metrics and countermeasures to enhance it.

Contribution

It introduces a unified framework with metrics for leadership democracy, analyzes protocols under attack, and proposes targeted improvements to strengthen leadership democracy.

Findings

Leader rotation alone does not ensure leadership democracy.

Adversaries can exploit voting patterns to undermine democracy.

Countermeasures can improve democracy with minimal overhead.

Abstract

With the growing popularity of blockchains, modern chained BFT protocols combining chaining and leader rotation to obtain better efficiency and leadership democracy have received increasing interest. Although the efficiency provisions of chained BFT protocols have been thoroughly analyzed, the leadership democracy has received little attention in prior work. In this paper, we scrutinize the leadership democracy of four representative chained BFT protocols, especially under attack. To this end, we propose a unified framework with two evaluation metrics, i.e., chain quality and censorship resilience, and quantitatively analyze chosen protocols through the Markov Decision Process (MDP). With this framework, we further examine the impact of two key components, i.e., voting pattern and leader rotation on leadership democracy. Our results indicate that leader rotation is not enough to provide the leadership democracy guarantee; an adversary could utilize the design, e.g., voting pattern, to deteriorate the leadership democracy significantly. Based on the analysis results, we propose customized countermeasures for three evaluated protocols to improve their leadership democracy with only slight protocol overhead and no change of consensus rules. We also discuss future directions toward building more democratic chained BFT protocols.