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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.

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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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