<aside> <img src="/icons/light-bulb_gray.svg" alt="/icons/light-bulb_gray.svg" width="40px" /> TL;DR The paper delves into decentralized consensus challenges in Distributed Ledger Technologies. Consensus mechanisms, security threats, and related work, including the Byzantine General's Problem and various algorithms, are extensively covered before introducing a novel hybrid protocol that improves scalability and addresses leader-based issues like DDoS attacks.
</aside>
You can find the official paper in the Springer website: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-13-5826-5_8
The implementations for decentralised consensus within Distributed Ledger Technologies are varied and many, but Blockchain, the underpinning technology underneath Bitcoin has witnessed revolutionary use case success. Although blockchain emerged in the Internet commerce sector as an immutable and decentralised ledger system, it can now be seen as a framework for autonomous decentralised data processing which enforces a flat and open-access network. The primary security threat in Blockchain would be a compromise or fallacy in the Consensus mechanism. The Proof of concept (PoX) approach used in Blockchains has elegantly emulated the leader-election function re- quired in a BFT protocol to simulate the block proposal process. Proof of work, the consensus mechanism that the Bitcoin protocol employed paved the way for blockchain as a viable DLT for commerce on the internet. Many “alt-coins” subsequently came up, however PoW has saturated with the explosion of popu- larity of the cryptocurrency and other alt-coins have achieved suboptimal solu- tions. There is the looming "51% attack” for resource pricing algorithms and various other attacks such as Bribe attacks, Sybil attacks and the Nothing-at- stake attack for the other alternate consensus mechanisms. The novel “PoStack” algorithm is a gamification of the node mining process, which enforces a simple notion: a node’s chance of mining cryptocurrency is proportional to its belief in a node that no one else believes in. The protocol has modest computational and financial needs, which reduces the barrier to entry.
Presentation of our work before publication in SSCC 2018.
Presentation of our work before publication in SSCC 2018.