Intelligent Adaptive Federated Byzantine Agreement for Robust Blockchain Consensus

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adaptive Federated Byzantine Agreement model that dynamically reconfigures validator quorum slices based on real-time trust assessments, significantly improving blockchain consensus robustness under validator failures.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel adaptive FBA architecture that reconfigures quorum slices using trust scores, enhancing resilience against validator outages compared to classical FBA.

Findings

System remains stable with over 50% validator disconnection

Supports consensus with as few as three validators

Outperforms existing protocols in robustness tests

Abstract

The Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) achieves rapid consensus by relying on overlapping quorum slices. But this architecture leads to a high dependence on the availability of validators when about one fourth of validators go down, the classical FBA can lose liveness or fail to reach agreement. We thus come up with an Adaptive FBA architecture that can reconfigure quorum slices intelligently based on real time validator reputation to overcome this drawback. Our model includes trust scores computed from EigenTrust and a sliding window behavioral assessment to determine the reliability of validators. We have built the intelligent adaptive FBA model and conducted tests in a Stellar based setting. Results of real life experiments reveal that the system is stable enough to keep consensus when more than half of the validators (up to 62 percent) are disconnected, which is a great extension of the failure threshold of a classical FBA. A fallback mode allows the network to be functional with as few as three validators, thus showing a significant robustness enhancement. Besides, a comparative study with the existing consensus protocols shows that Adaptive FBA can be an excellent choice for the next generation of blockchain systems, especially for constructing a resilient blockchain infrastructure.