Brief Announcement: Carry the Tail in Consensus Protocols

Abstract

We present Carry-the-Tail, the first deterministic atomic broadcast protocol in partial synchrony that, after GST, simultaneously guarantees two desirable properties: (i) a constant fraction of commits are proposed by non-faulty leaders against tail-forking attacks, and (ii) optimal, worst-case quadratic communication under a cascade of faulty leaders. The solution also guarantees linear amortized communication, i.e., the steady-state is linear. Combining these two desirable properties was not simultaneously achieved previously: on one hand, prior atomic broadcast solutions achieve per-view linear word communication complexity. However, they face a significant degradation in throughput under tail-forking attack. On the other hand, existing solutions to tail-forking attacks require either quadratic communication steps or computationally-prohibitive SNARK generation. 
The key technical contribution is Carry, a practical drop-in mechanism for streamlined protocols in the HotStuff family. Carry guarantees good performance against tail-forking and removes most leader-induced stalls, while retaining linear traffic and protocol simplicity. Carry-the-Tail implements the Carry mechanism on HotStuff-2.