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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.3

CFT-Forensics: High-Performance Byzantine Accountability for Crash Fault Tolerant Protocols

Authors: Weizhao Tang, Peiyao Sheng, Ronghao Ni, Pronoy Roy, Xuechao Wang, Giulia Fanti, and Pramod Viswanath

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 316, 6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2024)

Abstract

Crash fault tolerant (CFT) consensus algorithms are commonly used in scenarios where system components are trusted - e.g., enterprise settings and government infrastructure. However, CFT consensus can be broken by even a single corrupt node. A desirable property in the face of such potential Byzantine faults is accountability: if a corrupt node breaks the protocol and affects consensus safety, it should be possible to identify the culpable components with cryptographic integrity from the node states. Today, the best-known protocol for providing accountability to CFT protocols is called PeerReview; it essentially records a signed transcript of all messages sent during the CFT protocol. Because PeerReview is agnostic to the underlying CFT protocol, it incurs high communication and storage overhead. We propose CFT-Forensics, an accountability framework for CFT protocols. We show that for a special family of forensics-compliant CFT protocols (which includes widely-used CFT protocols like Raft and multi-Paxos), CFT-Forensics gives provable accountability guarantees. Under realistic deployment settings, we show theoretically that CFT-Forensics operates at a fraction of the cost of PeerReview. We subsequently instantiate CFT-Forensics for Raft, and implement Raft-Forensics as an extension to the popular nuRaft library. In extensive experiments, we demonstrate that Raft-Forensics adds low overhead to vanilla Raft. With 256 byte messages, Raft-Forensics achieves a peak throughput 87.8% of vanilla Raft at 46% higher latency (+44 ms). We finally integrate Raft-Forensics into the open-source central bank digital currency OpenCBDC, and show that in wide-area network experiments, Raft-Forensics achieves 97.8% of the throughput of Raft, with 14.5% higher latency (+326 ms).

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Weizhao Tang, Peiyao Sheng, Ronghao Ni, Pronoy Roy, Xuechao Wang, Giulia Fanti, and Pramod Viswanath. CFT-Forensics: High-Performance Byzantine Accountability for Crash Fault Tolerant Protocols. In 6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 316, pp. 3:1-3:25, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)

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@InProceedings{tang_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2024.3,
  author =	{Tang, Weizhao and Sheng, Peiyao and Ni, Ronghao and Roy, Pronoy and Wang, Xuechao and Fanti, Giulia and Viswanath, Pramod},
  title =	{{CFT-Forensics: High-Performance Byzantine Accountability for Crash Fault Tolerant Protocols}},
  booktitle =	{6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2024)},
  pages =	{3:1--3:25},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-345-4},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2024},
  volume =	{316},
  editor =	{B\"{o}hme, Rainer and Kiffer, Lucianna},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.3},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-209399},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.3},
  annote =	{Keywords: CFT Protocols, forensics, blockchain}
}

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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.5

Proof of Diligence: Cryptoeconomic Security for Rollups

Authors: Peiyao Sheng, Ranvir Rana, Senthil Bala, Himanshu Tyagi, and Pramod Viswanath

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 316, 6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2024)

Abstract

Layer 1 (L1) blockchains such as Ethereum are secured under an "honest supermajority of stake" assumption for a large pool of validators who verify each and every transaction on it. This high security comes at a scalability cost which not only effects the throughput of the blockchain but also results in high gas fees for executing transactions on chain. The most successful solution for this problem is provided by optimistic rollups, Layer 2 (L2) blockchains that execute transactions outside L1 but post the transaction data on L1. The security for such L2 chains is argued, informally, under the assumption that a set of nodes will check the transaction data posted on L1 and raise an alarm (a fraud proof) if faulty transactions are detected. However, all current deployments lack a proper incentive mechanism for ensuring that these nodes will do their job "diligently", and simply rely on a cursory incentive alignment argument for security. We solve this problem by introducing an incentivized watchtower network designed to serve as the first line of defense for rollups. Our main contribution is a "Proof of Diligence" protocol that requires watchtowers to continuously provide a proof that they have verified L2 assertions and get rewarded for the same. Proof of Diligence protocol includes a carefully-designed incentive mechanism that is provably secure when watchtowers are rational actors, under a mild rational independence assumption. Our proposed system is now live on Ethereum testnet. We deployed a watchtower network and implemented Proof of Diligence for multiple optimistic rollups. We extract execution as well as inclusion proofs for transactions as a part of the bounty. Each watchtower has minimal additional computational overhead beyond access to standard L1 and L2 RPC nodes. Our watchtower network comprises of 10 different (rationally independent) EigenLayer operators, secured using restaked Ethereum and spread across three different continents, watching two different optimistic rollups for Ethereum, providing them a decentralized and trustfree first line of defense. The watchtower network can be configured to watch the batches committed by sequencer on L1, providing an approximately 3 minute (cryptoeconomically secure) finality since the additional overhead for watching is very low. This is much lower than the finality delay in the current setup where it takes about 45 minutes for state assertions on L1, and hence will not delay the finality process on L1.

Cite as

Peiyao Sheng, Ranvir Rana, Senthil Bala, Himanshu Tyagi, and Pramod Viswanath. Proof of Diligence: Cryptoeconomic Security for Rollups. In 6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 316, pp. 5:1-5:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)

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@InProceedings{sheng_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2024.5,
  author =	{Sheng, Peiyao and Rana, Ranvir and Bala, Senthil and Tyagi, Himanshu and Viswanath, Pramod},
  title =	{{Proof of Diligence: Cryptoeconomic Security for Rollups}},
  booktitle =	{6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2024)},
  pages =	{5:1--5:24},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-345-4},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2024},
  volume =	{316},
  editor =	{B\"{o}hme, Rainer and Kiffer, Lucianna},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.5},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-209417},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.5},
  annote =	{Keywords: blockchain, rollup, game theory, security}
}

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Documents authored by Sheng, Peiyao

CFT-Forensics: High-Performance Byzantine Accountability for Crash Fault Tolerant Protocols

Abstract

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Proof of Diligence: Cryptoeconomic Security for Rollups

Abstract

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