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Register a new userSecurity Analysis of Ripple Consensus
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Added by
Christian Cachin
Publication date
2020
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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The Ripple network is one of the most prominent blockchain platforms and its native XRP token currently has one of the highest cryptocurrency market capitalizations. The Ripple consensus protocol powers this network and is generally considered to a Byzantine fault-tolerant agreement protocol, which can reach consensus in the presence of faulty or malicious nodes. In contrast to traditional Byzantine agreement protocols, there is no global knowledge of all participating nodes in Ripple consensus; instead, each node declares a list of other nodes that it trusts and from which it considers votes. Previous work has brought up concerns about the liveness and safety of the consensus protocol under the general assumptions stated initially by Ripple, and there is currently no appropriate understanding of its workings and its properties in the literature. This paper closes this gap and makes two contributions. It first provides a detailed, abstract description of the protocol, which has been derived from the source code. Second, the paper points out that the abstract protocol may violate safety and liveness in several simple executions under relatively benign network assumptions.
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Blockchain protocols differ in fundamental ways, including the mechanics of selecting users to produce blocks (e.g., proof-of-work vs. proof-of-stake) and the method to establish consensus (e.g., longest chain rules vs. Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) inspired protocols). These fundamental differences have hindered apples-to-apples comparisons between different categories of blockchain protocols and, in turn, the development of theory to formally discuss their relative merits. This paper presents a parsimonious abstraction sufficient for capturing and comparing properties of many well-known permissionless blockchain protocols, simultaneously capturing essential properties of both proof-of-work (PoW) and proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols, and of both longest-chain-type and BFT-type protocols. Our framework blackboxes the precise mechanics of the user selection process, allowing us to isolate the properties of the selection process that are significant for protocol design. We demonstrate the utility of our general framework with several concrete results: 1. We prove a CAP-type impossibility theorem asserting that liveness with an unknown level of participation rules out security in a partially synchronous setting. 2. Delving deeper into the partially synchronous setting, we prove that a necessary and sufficient condition for security is the production of certificates, meaning stand-alone proofs of block confirmation. 3. Restricting to synchronous settings, we prove that typical protocols with a known level of participation (including longest chain-type PoS protocols) can be adapted to provide certificates, but those with an unknown level of participation cannot. 4. Finally, we use our framework to articulate a modular two-step approach to blockchain security analysis that effectively reduces the permissionless case to the permissioned case.
We present new protocols for Byzantine state machine replication and Byzantine agreement in the synchronous and authenticated setting. The celebrated PBFT state machine replication protocol tolerates $f$ Byzantine faults in an asynchronous setting using $3f+1$ replicas, and has since been studied or deployed by numerous works. In this work, we improve the Byzantine fault tolerance threshold to $n=2f+1$ by utilizing a relaxed synchrony assumption. We present a synchronous state machine replication protocol that commits a decision every 3 rounds in the common case. The key challenge is to ensure quorum intersection at one honest replica. Our solution is to rely on the synchrony assumption to form a post-commit quorum of size $2f+1$, which intersects at $f+1$ replicas with any pre-commit quorums of size $f+1$. Our protocol also solves synchronous authenticated Byzantine agreement in expected 8 rounds. The best previous solution (Katz and Koo, 2006) requires expected 24 rounds. Our protocols may be applied to build Byzantine fault tolerant systems or improve cryptographic protocols such as cryptocurrencies when synchrony can be assumed.
Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) state machine replication (SMR) has been studied for over 30 years. Recently it has received more attention due to its application in permissioned blockchain systems. A sequence of research efforts focuses on improving the commit latency of the SMR protocol in the common good case, including PBFT with $3$-round latency and $ngeq 3f+1$ and FaB with $2$-round latency and $ngeq 5f+1$. In this paper, we propose an authenticated protocol that solves $2$-round BFT SMR with only $ngeq 5f-1$ replicas, which refutes the optimal resiliency claim made in FaB for needing $n geq 5f+1$ for $2$-round PBFT-style BFT protocols. For the special case when $f=1$, our protocol needs only $4$ replicas, and strictly improves PBFT by reducing the latency by one round (even when one backup is faulty).
Consensus protocols for asynchronous networks are usually complex and inefficient, leading practical systems to rely on synchronous protocols. This paper attempts to simplify asynchronous consensus by building atop a novel threshold logical clock abstraction, which enables upper layers to operate as if on a synchronous network. This approach yields an asynchronous consensus protocol for fail-stop nodes that may be simpler and more robust than Paxos and its leader-based variants, requiring no common coins and achieving consensus in a constant expected number of rounds. The same approach can be strengthened against Byzantine failures by building on well-established techniques such as tamper-evident logging and gossip, accountable state machines, threshold signatures and witness cosigning, and verifiable secret sharing. This combination of existing abstractions and threshold logical clocks yields a modular, cleanly-layered approach to building practical and efficient Byzantine consensus, distributed key generation, time, timestamping, and randomness beacons, and other critical services.
Bolted is a new architecture for bare-metal clouds that enables tenants to control tradeoffs between security, price, and performance. Security-sensitive tenants can minimize their trust in the public cloud provider and achieve similar levels of security and control that they can obtain in their own private data centers. At the same time, Bolted neither imposes overhead on tenants that are security insensitive nor compromises the flexibility or operational efficiency of the provider. Our prototype exploits a novel provisioning system and specialized firmware to enable elasticity similar to virtualized clouds. Experimentally we quantify the cost of different levels of security for a variety of workloads and demonstrate the value of giving control to the tenant.
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