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Safe Permissionless Consensus

Authors Youer Pu, Lorenzo Alvisi, Ittay Eyal

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Author Details

Youer Pu
  • Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Lorenzo Alvisi
  • Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Ittay Eyal
  • Technion, Haifa, Israel

Funding

This work was supported in part by the NSF grant CNS-CORE 2106954, BSF and IC3.

Cite AsGet BibTex

Youer Pu, Lorenzo Alvisi, and Ittay Eyal. Safe Permissionless Consensus. In 36th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2022). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 246, pp. 33:1-33:15, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2022)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2022.33

Abstract

Nakamoto’s consensus protocol works in a permissionless model, where nodes can join and leave without notice. However, it guarantees agreement only probabilistically. Is this weaker guarantee a necessary concession to the severe demands of supporting a permissionless model? This paper shows that, at least in a benign failure model, it is not. It presents Sandglass, the first permissionless consensus algorithm that guarantees deterministic agreement and termination with probability 1 under general omission failures. Like Nakamoto, Sandglass adopts a hybrid synchronous communication model, where, at all times, a majority of nodes (though their number is unknown) are correct and synchronously connected, and allows nodes to join and leave at any time.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Computer systems organization → Dependable and fault-tolerant systems and networks
Keywords
  • Consensus
  • Permissionless
  • Nakamoto
  • Deterministic Safety

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