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Documents authored by Wang, Xuechao


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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).

Cite as

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}
}
Document
Security Analysis of Filecoin’s Expected Consensus in the Byzantine vs Honest Model

Authors: Xuechao Wang, Sarah Azouvi, and Marko Vukolić

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 282, 5th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2023)


Abstract
Filecoin is the largest storage-based open-source blockchain, both by storage capacity (>11EiB) and market capitalization. This paper provides the first formal security analysis of Filecoin’s consensus (ordering) protocol, Expected Consensus (EC). Specifically, we show that EC is secure against an arbitrary adversary that controls a fraction β of the total storage for β m < 1- e^{-(1-β)m}, where m is a parameter that corresponds to the expected number of blocks per round, currently m = 5 in Filecoin. We then present an attack, the n-split attack, where an adversary splits the honest miners between multiple chains, and show that it is successful for β m ≥ 1- e^{-(1-β)m}, thus proving that β m = 1- e^{-(1-β)m} is the tight security threshold of EC. This corresponds roughly to an adversary with 20% of the total storage pledged to the chain. Finally, we propose two improvements to EC security that would increase this threshold. One of these two fixes is being implemented as a Filecoin Improvement Proposal (FIP).

Cite as

Xuechao Wang, Sarah Azouvi, and Marko Vukolić. Security Analysis of Filecoin’s Expected Consensus in the Byzantine vs Honest Model. In 5th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 282, pp. 5:1-5:21, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023)


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@InProceedings{wang_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2023.5,
  author =	{Wang, Xuechao and Azouvi, Sarah and Vukoli\'{c}, Marko},
  title =	{{Security Analysis of Filecoin’s Expected Consensus in the Byzantine vs Honest Model}},
  booktitle =	{5th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2023)},
  pages =	{5:1--5:21},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-303-4},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2023},
  volume =	{282},
  editor =	{Bonneau, Joseph and Weinberg, S. Matthew},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2023.5},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-191943},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2023.5},
  annote =	{Keywords: Decentralized storage, Consensus, Security analysis}
}
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