Gorilla: Safe Permissionless Byzantine Consensus

Youer Pu, Ali Farahbakhsh, Lorenzo Alvisi, Ittay Eyal

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Nakamoto's consensus protocol works in a permissionless model and tolerates Byzantine failures, but only offers probabilistic agreement. Recently, the Sandglass protocol has shown such weaker guarantees are not a necessary consequence of a permissionless model; yet, Sandglass only tolerates benign failures, and operates in an unconventional partially synchronous model. We present Gorilla Sandglass, the first Byzantine tolerant consensus protocol to guarantee, in the same synchronous model adopted by Nakamoto, deterministic agreement and termination with probability 1 in a permissionless setting. We prove the correctness of Gorilla by mapping executions that would violate agreement or termination in Gorilla to executions in Sandglass, where we know such violations are impossible. Establishing termination proves particularly interesting, as the mapping requires reasoning about infinite executions and their probabilities.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication37th International Symposium on Distributed Computing, DISC 2023
EditorsRotem Oshman
ISBN (Electronic)9783959773010
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2023
Event37th International Symposium on Distributed Computing, DISC 2023 - L'Aquila, Italy
Duration: 10 Oct 202312 Oct 2023

Publication series

NameLeibniz International Proceedings in Informatics, LIPIcs
Volume281

Conference

Conference37th International Symposium on Distributed Computing, DISC 2023
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityL'Aquila
Period10/10/2312/10/23

Keywords

  • Blockchains
  • Byzantine fault tolerance
  • Consensus
  • Deterministic Safety
  • Permissionless

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software

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