Efficient DAG-Based Consensus (Invited Talk) ...

• Main Author: Sonnino, Alberto
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik 2022
• Subjects: Consensus protocol; Byzantine Fault Tolerant; Security and privacy → Distributed systems security; narwhal*
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.4230/oasics.fab.2022.4; https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.FAB.2022.4

This talk shows how to build high-performant Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) quorum-based consensus cores. The talks starts by challenging the common misconception that the overall communication complexity of the protocol is the key factor determining performance. We instead argue that the bottleneck of many state-of-the-art consensus protocols is their sequential use of the machine’s resources (network, storage, CPU), and that data dissemination is the most resource-intensive task. In light of the above considerations, the first insight to build performant BFT-based consensus cores is to separate the task of reliable transaction dissemination from transaction ordering. We show how to design a new DAG-based mempool protocol, called Narwhal, specialising in high-throughput reliable dissemination and storage of causal histories of transactions. Narwhal tolerates an asynchronous network and maintains high performance despite failures. It is designed to easily scale-out using multiple workers at each validator to ... : OASIcs, Vol. 101, 5th International Symposium on Foundations and Applications of Blockchain 2022 (FAB 2022), pages 4:1-4:1 ...